Despite a back that makes me feel like I'm 20 years older than I am, having had two May birthdays in our home plus mothers day, weather that just will not cooperate, a last minute visit from my parents on the one decent weekend we had and a firm deadline at work that kept me working weekends three weeks in a row,  we've managed to get quite a bit done in the last month (little over actually) that it's been since I last added my two cents around here. Shall we catch up?

In early April, we decided it was time to start the process of beginning a new flock of chickens for the backyard. They were indoors in one of my "Chicken Condo's" as I like to call them and reminded us all how darn cute the little guys really can be.

We decided on a few new varieties this time around. In addition to the prolific white egg layer breeds that we already have experience with, the White and Brown Leghorns, we also decided to try out a couple of Buff Orpingtons and some Rhode Island Reds. Both are brown egg layers and are supposed to be a little less flighty. So far it seems to hold true.

Just like all teenagers, they have to go through that gangly, "don't look at me, I'm having a bad feather day" period. Not as cute, but still fun to watch as they sort out their pecking order.

And speaking of cute teenagers, my wife and I spent a great Earth Day at a local educational nature center with our own "flock." We were appreciating the fine solar array here and thinking of the day we'll have our own. Don't yet know when that'll be, but it will be. My little alternative energy engineer in the green shirt there, already has his own small solar array in the backyard that he's using to charge an old car battery. He and I have plans to get my greenhouse "off the grid" this summer. We won't be able to heat it with this, but I will be able to handle small-scale lighting and air circulation. It will be fun to work on together.

And speaking of that greenhouse, it's been chock full! I did some major transplanting in mid April and was actually able to take the thinnings from the seedlings that I had and propagate them into fresh cell packs to have entirely new plants. I think all told I ended up with nearly 110 tomato starts for this year. Those extra propagated starts will be getting donated to a community garden that I'm going to be helping out with, but that is fodder for an entirely different post.

I should also mention that I started a YouTube Channel in April. A demo on how I went about thinning and propagating my tomatoes was one of the first things I added. I plan to add many more as the season progresses.

Tomatoes and peppers aren't the only things growing in there though. Because of my shorter growing season, I've started cantalopes, watermelons, cucumbers, zucchini and these pumpkin plants that are loving the heat among other things.

I mentioned the two birthdays in the house ... well, I guess I can admit one of them was mine. I slid into 39 this year and treated myself to one of the things that I've been really wanting for some time: a Meyer Lemon tree.

And that weather I complained about earlier. Well, this was what I got the other day, May 14th actually, as a warning that spring is still here and Mom Nature will do as she likes! One minute the day was beautiful with a few clouds over the mountains, the next I noticed them getting darker and it looked like rain. I had barely put the plants I had out of the greenhouse hardening off back inside before these started falling from the sky. Wacky!

All in all, I'd have to say things are going pretty well though. The garden beds are filling up, the days are longer, and even if the weather does leave a little bit of predictability to be desired, it's still been a pretty darn nice spring.

How's everything going in your necks of the woods? Hopefully Springing up nicely!

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or learn more about his garden at A posse ad esse.

This past weekend was a busy one around the 'stead. Dear wife's shoulder has been benefiting some from physical therapy and so she's been able to do a little more each day. That managed to free me up for the weekend to get into the yard for some serious clean up and even a little planting.

Last fall we invested in a proper greenhouse to do some greenhouse gardening. I had hoped to over-winter some tomatoes in there, but alas my dreams were slightly larger than my current abilities. (Admitting it is the first step in correcting it!) After winter had finally claimed the few plants that were in there for it's own, I essentially let the junk just pile up and the floor turn to weeds. Oh yeah, tomatoes won't over-winter, but I could have had fresh dandylion, arugula and cilantro salads nearly all winter.

The unfortunate side effect of this, that I hadn't anticipated, was that by letting weeds grow unfettered I gave a wonderfull little ecosystem to the aphids to over-winter in too! Yep, I blew that one! I think I've been proactive enough though to have caught the worst of it. I mixed up a batch of insecticidal soap and sprayed everything down with it this Saturday in order to kill off as many of them as I could. Then Sunday, I cut and killed all plant life down that was growing in between the stones and removed it straight to the trash can with any aphids that were on it in tow.

Here's the result. 

Not too shabby huh? Even looks like I could get something growing in there if I tried. In fact, if you look closely in the back corner you'll see that I do. Right there on top of the water barrels that I added this weekend to help me stabilize the temperature in there.

Those are artichokes. Can you believe it? They were the only things worthwhile to over-winter in the green house successfully. I had two plants in pots last year that didn't do anything much through the summer – too hot and too small of pots I think – but I decided to put them in the G-house over the winter to see if they could hold their own. Boy did they! As soon as we were past January they started to slowly fill in and throw out new shoots on their sides. A couple of weeks ago I split the smaller of the two and got the four starts that are on the left. This past weekend I split the other, larger, plant into 8 more. Now, from the two small globe artichoke starts that I bought last year I have twelve new, even bigger ones to plant this year. I can't wait for grilled artichoke hearts!

I also got some chinese cabbage into the ground this weekend. I had really good success with these last year so I have high hopes for kimchi and stir fry this year too.

If your wondering what's up with the little display cover, it's my version of a "garden cloche" done on the cheap! If you've ever looked into the old Victorian style garden cloches you know that one this size can easily run twenty dollars or more. Well, I found this little figurine display cover at our local thrift store with about 18 of it's buddies for 1.50 a piece! That's my kind of pricing, so I'm trying out the old Victorian technique of cloche gardening. I'll keep you posted on the results

I can feel it already ... this is gonna be a great garden year! (Yeah, yeah, I know I always say that, but hey ... spring's the time for optimism!)

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse

Every year it seems like I go straight from pulling out the last plants of the year and whining about how I’ll miss the garden to planning the next years garden, planting seeds and trying to play catch up before you know it! It’s that time again for sure and much is in the works for this glorious growing season!

After last years bumper crops, we decided that this year we’d start not only jokingly calling our little backyard garden our “farm” but actually treating it like it was a little bit of one. We’ll be doing this by participating in one of our local farmers markets. That being the case, we have a lot of solid prep work to do and need to really take our planning and execution to a much higher level. Luckily, so far so good.

It’s not been without it’s challenges mind you. The Monday before last Thanksgiving our whole family was in a car accident that totalled out our car. Everyone was generally OK, but four of the five of us needed a couple of months of Physical Therapy and my wife ended up needing her shoulder operated on. That’s left me with A LOT of work to do on my own. We’ve had to make a few adjustments but as I said, so far so good. How about a little pictorial update of the spring so far?

Peas were pre-germinated early this year and managed to get put into the ground a full two weeks earlier than last year. This wan’t necessarily because I was so well prepared as much as because the seed was getting old (2007 seed!) and I wanted to make sure it would sprout before relying on it too late in the season to replant. It has a really good germination rate as you can see so it was planted a few days later.

I’ve found that because I spend so much time “growing my soil” that I’ve been able to grow very intensively in my raised beds. Much more so that I would be able to in a more traditional garden bed. By planting my peas 4-5 inches apart in rows spaced 4-5 inches apart, I’m able to get somewhere near 150-170 pea plants to grow in one of my 4-by-6-foot raised beds. I plant two of those each year and it gives us a lot of peas.

Here’s a “pea’s eye” view of the new seedlings popping up.

There’s been a lot growing on indoors too. The seed starting rack that I wrote about last year has been set up in front of our east facing sliding glass doors and is chock full of lots of good stuff.

The bottom shelf is a hodgepodge of some early iceburg lettuce and cauliflower starts, some salad greens for cut and come again consumption, some luffa and squash starts that will end up in our green house soon and a mix of flower starts.

On the top shelf are 48 cells of Kohlrabi, 24 cells of Broccoli and 24 cells of Brussel Sprouts on one side that are getting about ready to harden off and get into the ground soon. On the side nearer to us in this picture are tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes, oh yeah and some peppers. 54 tomato starts and 18 peppers to be exact.

Helpful hint: If you’ve decided to start some of your own seedlings indoors this year, make sure to watch for phosphorus deficiency. It’s a common problem if seedlings aren’t warm enough. You’ll start to see purplish coloring and wilting in previously healthy seedlings. Keep them warm and try supplementing with a good liquid fertilizer. For instance a good organic fish emulsion.

Anyway, as I said, things are coming along pretty good so far in my neck of the woods. Hope they are for you as well. Now, if I could just get this Utah weather to make up its mind!

Paul~

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse 

So much to talk about … where to begin??? The last time I posted here was waaaay back at the end of June!! I know, I know, it’s unforgivable. “Bad Blogger ... Bad blogger!!”

So then, now that the self punishment has been doled out, what say I start trying to get you up to date? You may remember that I mentioned that my wife and I went through our local extension service’s Master Gardener program this Spring. It was a pretty long course that consisted of 40 hours of classroom instruction spread out over 10 weeks. But it didn’t stop there; the second part of the program, and one that must be finished if we were to actually be counted as “graduates” of the program was to provide 40 hours of garden-related service to our community. That took a surprisingly long time to do working on it only part time but was truly one of the most rewarding parts of the process as well.

One of the things that I did a lot of was to teach beginning gardening classes to different groups in my area. It was so fun to get to share my passion for the garden and the many fruits of that sort of labor with my neighbors and community groups. I can only hope that I was able to affect at least one person or family. We also spent a couple of afternoons at our county fair manning a Master Gardeners booth and worked together to answer phones at the extension service office; both times providing knowledge and “expertise” on some of the typical garden problems that arise in our area. They’re called diagnostic services and its amazing how much you can learn just by looking up information for others. I heartily encourage anyone who is seriously interested in gardening, of whatever sort, to check in with your local extension service to see if there is a Master Gardener class scheduled for your area. Now is the time to check too since they usually start at the beginning of the year.

And speaking of the garden, a lot of good things came out of it this year. This spring we added a new garden bed to the side-yard area of the front of our house. It’s not a common site in our suburban area but we hope it will be soon! You can see that new garden area in the bed below.

The low lying plants are the potatoes that I talked about planting earlier this year, but as you can see they weren’t the only thing that did well in this area. Let me take this opportunity to tell you about how many sun flowers of varied and prolific numbers that we had. The sunflowers you see here - both the large ones and the small - are naturally seeded ones that came up as volunteers from last year. I did thin them out quite a bit, but the ones I left did great and brought us lots and lots of bees and lady beetles. Of course we know that the lady beetles showed up because we had an abundance of aphids.

In the back yard we had some more positive developments. The Lasagna Garden Beds that I started at this time last year and planted for the first time this summer did better than I could have expected! (That’s it above.) Watermelons, tomatoes peppers and cukes all did awesome in the fertile, nutrient-rich humus. I’ve decided that this fall I’m ammending all my raised beds with my last clippings, leaves, coffee grounds and chicken bedding to break down over the winter and enrich the soil. I am sold!

Also in the back yard I finally got the rest of my side yard cleaned up and added four more 4-by-4 raised beds to it. That’s them all the way down at the end of the row. The soil is still a little bit neutral for my liking, being that it is just a basic soiless mix of peat, vermiculite and compost. I’m ammending it this fall and look forward to growing in it next year.

One of my big successes this year was with okra. (You can see the early growth in the picture above, it’s in the second bed from the right.) They are really an interesting plant. Before the familiar pods in the picture below form, this relative of the hibiscus and rose of sharon sports a quite beautiful flower. Better keep an eye out though, they’re only there for about a day. I’ve learned that they don’t like any cool weather, nor do they care to have wet feet. Otherwise a pretty easy plant to work with.

With all the talk of the good things going on you must be wondering how the harvest was. Quantity isn’t the sole measure of a successful garden mind you, but it sure does help an urban farmer to know how he’s doing. I’m glad to report that this was our best season yet! Of course that was bouyed by the added garden areas that we developed this year but I also felt a little more organized than I have been in years past.

Here’s one of only a few harvest pictures that I took this year. It was after we had pulled our mid season potatoes and a half bushel of tomatoes; along with some other stuff, too, of course.

Ever wonder what 135+ pounds of tomatoes looks like? OK, I never did either, but now I know ... and here it is. One of the things that we decided to do a little differently this year was to plant a good mix of indeterminate and determinate tomatoes. Of course wanted to have enough tomatoes trickling in to keep us in fresh ones (indeterminate), but this year we also wanted to have those big single harvests (determinate), too, so that we could can and put up more tomatoes for this winter. Mission accomplished.

After all was said and done we ended up with just barely shy of 810 pounds of food from our 0.25 acre suburban lot, not counting the eggs we got, which I stopped counting at somewhere past 750. To say I was pleased would be an understatement.

Of course all was not successfull, as is the way in the garden, or we would likely have topped 1000 pounds. Pumpkins, watermelon and some zucchini plants were completely decimated by an abnormally large number of squash bugs. Our green beans also did miserably, I think due to the long cool spring that we had this year, and were plagued by a rust not long after emerging. I had to plant them twice and still needed a fungicide. Time to rotate beds for a few years I’d say.

Well, I think that almost catches you up with me. Still a few more recent developments, but I think I’ll try to put those in another post. Hope all your gardens did well this year. For my part I’m looking forward to relaxing just a little and getting ready for the holidays.

Best to you all!

Paul Gardener~

One of the things that I've begun doing this year is to expand on my outreach efforts to new gardeners in my community. It's not that I'm an expert on all things garden related; by no means do I fit that bill. I have however learned a lot of things through trial and error, and this spring my wife and I attended a two and a half month training program called the Master Gardener program. I learned a lot of new information there as well, and it's really helped with my efforts.

In talking to neighbors and friends, a few of which have been affected by the global economic downturn, one of their concerns is that starting a garden can be a costly adventure. That is particularly true here in northern Utah where we call home. We are very near to the shore of the Great Salt Lake, and because of that our soil is salty and alkaline. Add to that the fact that it is a sedimentary soil that over thousands of years has become hard pack clay, and it's not what most would call the optimum conditions for starting a new garden. Because of these factors and because Mel Bartholomew of square foot gardening fame began his whole movement in Utah just a half hour from where we live, raised bed gardening is very big here. It's not cheap to get started though, so I felt concerned with telling people that were already tight on money that they should spend a good size chunk of it on starting a raised bed. At the same time, I know that most people starting gardens directly in the ground have a couple of years of amending the soil ahead of them before they really starting seeing the "fruits" of their labors.

Enter the "Lasagna Garden." I picked up a book at our local thrift store last summer about a garden called a lasagna garden. It wasn't what it sounded like, a garden to grow lasagna ingredients, but rather was a raised bed garden that could be started with little investment and promised little effort for good return. The basics of what this is all about is building a garden bed from miscellaneous organic materials and letting them essentially compost in place to build a fertile soil that can support a garden.

I hate to suggest anyone try something that I haven't done myself, so, last fall, as a part of our "liberate the lawn" efforts in the back yard, we decided to give it a shot as a sort of experimental garden plot for this year. We already had plans to build a new raised bed there, so it was easy to just modify our plans to go with this new idea. We built the raised beds along our fence line using the same type of recycled concrete blocks that we'd used for the rest of our yard landscaping and, after breaking up the ground a bit with a pitch fork, layered the bottom of the bed with cardboard pieces that we got for free from work.

Next I filled the bed with layers of organic material like I was putting together a sort of organic compost lasagna. I took pictures of the process.

To fill the bed, I pulled over a thin layer of soil from the existing raised bed that I was tying into. Onto that I added layers of material like straw, homemade compost, grass clippings, composted chicken manure, course sawdust that was used as chicken bedding, coffee grounds from the local coffee shop and some left over peat and vermiculite that I happened to have on hand at the end of the season.

Knowing that it would sink, I filled it very full and left it to sit over the winter. The fall rains soaked it, the winter snows insulated it, and by early this spring we had what was beginning to look a lot like soil. A few months later and I dug into into it to plant my first crops; a mix of different plants that I hope will give me a good idea of lasagna gardening's benefits for different plants. I've planted watermelons, casaba melon, tomatoes, bush cucumbers, peppers and eggplants in it. The soil was soft and friable, and I needed no tools at all to plant the starts.

This picture was taken a little less than a month ago. So far, I am VERY impressed with the results of this method. The rich organic content of this bed drains well while at the same time holding a good amount of water. Below the surface, the soil looks to be very rich and fertile. This is the first time I've been able to get watermelons to grow well at all, and I'm already starting to see set fruit on my pepper plants.

If you're feeling a pinch in your pocketbook, or maybe have friends that are, this is a nearly zero cost alternative to building a raised bed garden that can support a lot of garden and can be worked very easily. It seems to be a good alternative and is certainly one that I look forward to exploring further.

All the best.

Paul~

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse  

Every year, right around the peak of spring, we do a whole bunch of yard clean up work in our front yard. It’s usually in that period around Mothers day when we pick up a few trays of annuals at our local nursery and it usually takes the good part of a weekend to do. This year was no exception in that regard.

An interesting thing happened this year when I got to this part of the garden though. It’s one of my favorite places because it's all Columbines that self seed and get bigger every year. As I was cleaning up, I was wondering why the flowers didn't look quite right this year. So I looked a little closer.

Holy Crap! Infestation! The aphids were here and they were here in force!

Now it's not uncommon for me to get some aphids. Not even uncommon to find them out in force from time to time and I deal with the problems as they arise. This was by far the earliest and most intense infestation that I've ever had though.

At first glance I found that almost all the columbines on this side of the garden were under siege. In fact, I was about to break into the organic pesticide. I rarely ever do that, but this just seemed overwhelming. Before I did, I luckily looked a little closer and found something incredible. An ecosystem had developed right there.

Because of the abundant food supply, the ladybugs (Yes I know they're not bugs, they're beetles. That's the name I grew up with so that's what I call ’em OK?) had moved in and were reproducing like rabbits. They are natural predators to the aphid, so I thought it best to let them do their work. Also, I'm willing to sacrifice a few flowers in order to foster a healthy population of these beneficial insects for the rest of the season.

In that vein I decided to remove all the flower stalks from the plants and place them upside down in a bucket, then off to the trash. They were the most infested part of the plant so I wanted to give the beetles a head start on clearing them up. Aphids generally don’t have wings, although they can develop them for purposes of relocating when the food source is endangered or depleted, so I wasn’t worried about them coming out of the trash and returning. Don't worry, there were plenty left for the bugs to feed on.

WARNING ... EXPLICIT photos follow ...

Ok, they’re not really “explicit”, but I did find a regular lady bug love fest happening on some of the under story branches as I was pruning them.

I kind of felt a little peeping Tom-ish for taking these, but in the interest of education I'm willing to go the extra mile for you.

And this is "The act." If you look closely you'll see the two bodies of the beetles protruding from under their wing covers. And that kids, is how the birds and the beetles goes... MMMM K?

Here you can see the collection of yellow egg sacks lain neatly under a leaf and Mom heading off to eat more aphids no doubt.

So then, who’s this handsome little guy? Well, he is the larvae form of the Ladybird beetle. From this phase it'll go through a pupa phase and then emerge as the lady bug that we're all familiar with. So, if you see these guys crawling around the garden, they are your friend!

In the Short term, I had to make a concession to the aphids in that I gave up my flowers for this year. I have others. The bigger point is found in the long term view however. In that perspective I've helped to foster a natural ecosystem and life cycle that will benefit me and my garden later this year.

If the problem had persisted, I’d have had to go to the next step which, to me, would be to entirely cut off all green growth and let the plant try again. I’m happy to say however that this battle seems to have gone in my favor. The aphids have moved on to other plants where the battle continues but are in no where near the same numbers. And as for the lady bugs, well, I’ve seen more this year so far that I think I have in quite a few springs. So far so good I’d say!

All the best.

Paul~

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse 

There are a lot of folks in my neighborhood that have gardens. Utah is actually a pretty good place for that compared to a lot of other largely urbanized areas. I have neighbors that grow tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and peppers. I have a Thai and Chinese family across the street that grows insanely hot chilies and lemongrass, and another neighbor who grew up on property in Wisconsin that grows corn like he was back on the farm. The one crop that I don’t know many folks that grow is potatoes.

Of course I don’t know everyone in my neighborhood, and I’m sure there are those that do, my point is that potatoes, for whatever reason, seem to be one of those food crops that have been relegated to the likes of large farms or at the very least to large lots within the boundary communities.

Last year I tried to grow them in containers in the back yard. They got a great start but just never really did much beyond that. It’s an idea that I’d like to try again, but on a much smaller scale than the ten containers that I tried last year.

Never to be told I can’t do something though, I decided this year that it was time to get serious about this potato growing business; you know, back to basics. That meant rows and hilling. Rows and hilling was something that required space and space is sometimes a tight commodity in the suburbs. So what’s a guy to do when he’s trying to “grow possibilities” in the ‘burbs? Till some new area that’s what.

One of the features of the particular suburban area that I have chosen to urban farm is the accessory parking strip that resides just to the side of our driveways. It’s usually the depth of our driveway and in many homes has been concreted to provide a home for the RV, or the boat. In our case we had a small 14ft, old wooden boat. It sat on that side yard for 5 years and I don’t think it saw the water even once. So, I moved it out of the way, picked up the scrap wood and bits of trash that had blown in there and got to tilling.

We had brought in a full truck bed of compost last weekend for use around the house and a good quarter of it ended up in here.

After the tilling, I got around to aesthetics. One thing you always have to take into consideration when you’re trying to homestead the suburbs. Happy neighbors make for happy farmers OK? I had gotten lucky though and found some salvage vinyl fencing materials from a home that was being demolished around the corner. It took a couple of days and a good bit of creativity, but I was able to find a way to get the vinyl fencing up around the new garden area.

But all that is moot if I don’t have good beds right? Right! So the next step was to make sure I could take advantage of the deep tilled new soil that I had available. To do that I wanted to make sure that I could get in and out of the garden area with the minimum impact possible. I decided to add an access path and to shore up the useable soil onto one side of the garden bed. I had now officially turned the wasted space on the side of our yard into useable, arable, well tilled soil; on to the planting.

After doing some research and talking to the old man at the local nursery, I determined that this past week was the perfect time to start planting ‘taters. I hoed and turned the soil until it was into nine nearly 10 foot long rows. I mounded them up a little, turned in some organic fertilizer and then to each bed I counted out 7 seed potatoes.

After burying them about three-four inches I covered with soil and left them be. In about six weeks I’m hoping to be steaming up some young new potatoes to eat with my peas.

The most important thing is that there’s almost always an extra little bit of land on our property that, if someone were so inclined, they could find a way to make into a productive little piece of garden. Potatoes aren’t just for the farms … well, at least not only for the big farms. With a good bit of visualizing, and a little hard work we never know what’s possible do we?

P~

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse