Archive for the ‘Gardening’ Category
Thyme to Garden Now – A garden blog in Zone 5!
Posted by forsythkid on July 29, 2010
Posted in Gardening, Square foot gardening | Tagged: Forsythkid, Danomanno, Thyme to Garden now | Leave a Comment »
Making Your Salad Dollar Stretch!
Posted by forsythkid on May 18, 2010
A recent visit to the local grocery store in my town of Forsyth, Missouri convinced me more than ever that many of us should consider planting a small garden. Lettuce was well over a dollar a head, celery was pushing two dollars and you don’t even want to here about the cost of bell peppers! Yet, I’ve found a way to make these items really stretch.
I will admit that I am a salad junkie! Have been for as long as I can remember and it’s not unusual for me to have a salad with most every meal. But, since economic times have gone down hill and what with the job market all but non-existent, I’ve really had to watch my spending patterns. Trying to save is most felt when I shop for food these days. Not so long ago, a can of corn was under fifty cents. Now you can spend over a dollar. Vegetables were downright cheap and I can remember friends asking me why I even bothered to garden. I would always come back with the fact that my produce was at least pesticide free. Now, in 2010, I don’t have to use that excuse any longer.
So, how do I save money? If you look closely at the picture for this blog you will see that I have a pretty happy salad going here. There’s lettuce, romaine, parsley, celery, radishes, green onion and even a little bit of ham mixed with leftover peas going on in this dish. Because about half the ingredients came from my garden, the cost of this great diet meal is under a quarter! (At my last visit to a restaurant a small dinner salad was $2.50). Also, by creatively using leftovers from other meals, I am making use of ever bit of purchased food while enjoying the benefits of fresh produce from the garden. Now that’s a great way to save. You can see more on gardening in my blog ‘DanO’s Garden‘.
Posted in Carrots, Danomanno, Diet, Gardening, Health, Lettuce, Meals, Onions, Vegetables | Tagged: Cost of eating, Danomanno, Forsythkid, Salad dollars | Leave a Comment »
So, what’s happening in the garden?
Posted by forsythkid on April 9, 2010
After a cold night down here in southwestern Missouri, where the temperatures dipped down into the thirties overnight, I have to say that the following day was a gem. That seems to be the modis operandi in spring. A really brutal day of rain and cold is followed by warmth and fair skies. April can be like that. The good news is that cold weather crops like broccoli and romaine lettuce really love this kind of wacky treatment. Add radishes and onion sets to that also. I had the great pleasure of harvesting my very first radish today. It was a Cherry Belle radish and after cutting off the top and adding a little salt I can tell you that the crunchy, salty taste is everything that is good about spring to me.
So, as of this date (April 10th) in the year 2010, I have the following crops growing in my two four by eight foot raised beds; Little Caesar romaine lettuce, Cherry Belle radishes, white onion sets, bush beans, Kennebec potatoes, spinach and parsley. Also, in growing trays I have some plants grown from seed including; Thai Hot peppers, Bananarama peppers, more Little Caesar romaine lettuce and a just seeded tray containing Early Girl and Brandywine tomatoes. Wow! I can hardly wait for those beauties. I have a special place in my heart for freshly grown tomatoes. One of the greatest pleasures of gardening in the spring is the harvests you realize in the summer.
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One plant I am tracking this year are the seeds of Great Northern Beans I sowed from a package I purchased at a local store. I have planted them in a couple of spots and will be most interested in seeing if I can produce some dried beans at the end of the growing cycle. I am intrigued as to what kind of production I will realize per plant. Bean, if you have followed some of my earlier blogs are one of just two veggies that can provide all the essential amino acids we need to survive. The other is rice. Combine these two and you have a combination that can allow for survival during hard times. Not that I’m really worried that the United States is headed for dark times. I really believe that our 121 trillion dollar debt will be repaid (with interest) and that everyone will greatly prosper in the years ahead…I also believe firmly in the possibility of pigs flying.
You can see more on gardening in my blog ‘DanO’s Garden‘.
Posted in Gardening, Green pepper, Lettuce, Seed Starting, Spinach, Spring gardening, Tomatoes, Vegetables | Tagged: Danomanno, Forsythkid, Garden Report, Raised beds | Leave a Comment »
Great Northern Beans as Transplants
Posted by forsythkid on April 4, 2010
According to everything I’ve ever read, beans are supposed to be difficult to transplant. However, that has not been the case here in my raised beds located in southwestern Missouri.
I’m also pushing the season for these guys, a bit, when we are still not past the last average frost date of April the 15th. But, since I was experimenting with Great Northern Beans (purchased at a local grocery), I figured what the heck. My recent experiment involved using a wet paper towel, onto which I had placed ten beans, to see if they would germinate. After just 48 hours they all did and rather than throw them out, I elected to plant them out into one of my small raised bed. Well, as you can see, they are actually growing. Encouraged by this, now I hope to raise them to maturity to see if they are a pole or bush variety. If they turn out to be bush beans, I also plan to sow more later this spring directly into a four foot square area. I should be able to produce about 36 plants spaced equally about six inches apart. I want to get a feel for how many dried beans I can produce and what they would weigh. From that information, I could formulate how many bean plants would need to be grown to meet the needs of one person for one year. That is assuming that this hypothetical person also has a supply of rice or other foods to combine with the beans.
Great northern Beans are a nutrient dense food that, I feel, belongs in any Survival Garden plan. When combined with rice, a person could easily survive on eating just these two foods (along with a supply of water of course). That’s because, between the two of them, they supply the nine essential amino acids that the body cannot make it self out of the twenty one it needs to be able to survive.
You can see more on gardening in my blog ‘DanO’s Garden‘.
Posted in Gardening | Tagged: Beans, Danomanno, Forsythkid, tranplanting | Leave a Comment »
The Advantages of Growing Beans to Eat!
Posted by forsythkid on March 24, 2010
For some time now, I’ve made beans (both the green variety and dried) a part of my regular diet. I’ve grown Kentucky Pole Beans every year for the past twenty years in my home garden. They’re and easy plant and raise and since the pole version can go vertical they don’t take up a lot of space in my small garden. The dried versions like the Great Northern Bean are cheap to buy and store for just about forever. I love to eat them in recipes like Bean and Ham Soup.
Other than the taste, which I love, beans have a lot going for them. They belong to the Fabaceae family which are legumes and have had a very long history of human consumption. As far back as six thousand years ago they were grown regularly and eaten when meat was in short supply. When you combine beans with rice you are getting all the essential amino acids (see my article on this) that are needed to sustain life. The protein is considered a great substitute for meat.
Beans also supply a large dose of dietary fiber. A cup of cooked navy beans provides 46.6% of the recommended daily intake for fiber. Soluble fiber forms a gel-like substance in the digestive tract that combines with bile (which contains cholesterol) and ferries it out of the body. Beans are also able to help moderate blood glucose levels which can be important for anyone with this concern.
In a very interesting study that examined food intake patterns and risk of death from coronary heart disease, researchers followed more than 16,000 middle-aged men in the U.S., Finland, The Netherlands, Italy, former Yugoslavia, Greece and Japan for 25 years. Typical food patterns were: higher consumption of dairy products in Northern Europe; higher consumption of meat in the U.S.; higher consumption of vegetables, legumes, fish, and wine in Southern Europe; and higher consumption of cereals, soy products, and fish in Japan. When researchers analyzed this data in relation to the risk of death from heart disease, they found that higher legume consumption was associated with a whopping 82% reduction in heart attack risk!
This year I will be planting Great Northern Beans for the first time in my garden as part of an experiment to see just how productive they are. I plan to include them in my book concerning Survival Gardens that will be coming out next year. This book will be dedicated to things the average person can do to grow their own food and survive in times of global collapse.
Posted in Gardening | Tagged: Danomanno, Diabetes, Dried beans, Forsythkid, Heart Disease | Leave a Comment »
Soil Structure and Its Effect on Plant Growth
Posted by forsythkid on March 18, 2010
One of the major tenants of garden lore that is mentioned but rarely talked about in detail is the need to pay attention to garden soil structure. Too often a beginning gardener becomes disappointed with their early efforts not because of anything they did but rather due to shortcoming in the soil they planted in.
Plants require certain type of soil to grow in. Plain dirt dug up in the back yard may or may not cover all the bases, so let’s take a look at some of the key characteristics to look for in a good as opposed a poor soil. Let’s start by taking a look at what makes a soil suitable for growing crops. Soil that is of the right composition or mix is termed soil that has good tilth. Let’s explore some characteristics of tilth.
Basic Soil Composition
In the most general of terms, a soil can be broken down into two components: solids and spaces. The solids would be composed of things like minerals, sand and organics while the spaces would contain air and water. Now, about ninety percent of the solids could be further broken down into three classes or types; sand silt and clay which are really just rocky minerals divided up according to their size. The remaining ten percent is composed of organic material and it is this material that is vitally important to the future health of your plants. It’s also the one thing about soil that you can easily do something about! Included in the organic part are latterly billions of soil microbes that directly participate in the breakdown or decomposition of organics and then often aid in the transport of nutrients to the plant roots. We call decomposed organic material humus and it is the health of the tiny microbes that are what really matter. Good microbe populations equal healthy plants. The presence of humus in a soil is what gives it that great smell.
Air spaces constitute or make up about 50% of the volume of a healthy soil so they are very
important also. In the spaces you will find both air and water. Yes, roots require air to breath and if the spaces become compacted such as is seen from over tillage, you will get terrible results. The plants will latterly die for lack of air and water. The moral of this story is that once you get your soil in good condition, please don’t ever walk on it or do anything to compact it!
A Closer Look
Now that we see that soil is both spaces and solids, lets take a little closer look at how the solid part can be put together. Remember when I used the word tilth? Well, good tilth depends on the overall mix of soil texture, structure (or aggregation), density, drainage and water holding ability. This is influenced greatly by the exact proportion of clay, sand and silt that make it up. To the right is a chart of how different soils are made from varying the composition of these three basic ingredients. When you first look at it, you might be a little confused. So, what’s the best soil? Well, the answer is not to think so much as what is best as it is to think in terms of avoiding any extremes. So, if your soil is somewhere in the middle of the chart that’s good. If it’s tending towards one of the corners, then you might want to consider some soil management techniques that could apply depending on your circumstance. If you have small raised beds like I do, then you can always buy bags of different kinds of soil to alter the structure. If, on the other hand, you have a large backyard garden, this might not be a viable alternative. The good news is that almost any soil can be improved by the addition of compost. That will be subject of a future blog.
Posted in Danomanno, Gardening, Raised beds, Spring gardening, Vegetables | Tagged: Danomanno, Forsythkid, Soil structure, Tilth | 2 Comments »
Lettuce seed germination requirements
Posted by forsythkid on March 15, 2010
Here is a piece of information concerning lettuce seed germination I came across some time ago.
In related research, plant physiologists wondered why people have trouble with seed germination of lettuce in their vegetable gardens. They knew that seed germination was very high in Petri dishes in the laboratory.
It turns out that in lettuce seeds, unlike barley, a critical step in triggering seed germination is photo-activation. The seeds need to be exposed to light in order to germinate. I hope you are wondering, immediately, how germination responds to photon flux and wavelength of light!
Lettuce responds well to very low photon fluxes…it is not a photosynthetic process!
The wavelength of light is critical. The seeds germinate well in white light, but also to single “colors”…particularly red light (660 nm). On the other hand, far-red light (730 nm) strongly reduces lettuce germination.
It took a long time to identify, isolate, and characterize the photoreceptor. It is called phytochrome. Phytochrome exists in two different chemical forms: Pr and Pfr. Phytochrome in its Pr form absorbs light maximally in red wavelengths…hence Pr. Phytochrome in its Pfr form absorbs light maximally in far-red wavelengths…hence Pfr. The name of the form of phytochrome is determined by the color of light it absorbs maximally. What made characterizing phytochrome difficult was the fact that the two forms interconvert. As Pfr absorbs far-red light, it changes chemically into Pr! Similarly, Pr absorbs red light and changes chemically into Pfr.
If you think about how you might analyze a pigment (as you have done several times in lab!), you generally put an extract into a spectrophotometer and measure the absorbency of a wavelength at which the pigment maximally absorbs light. With phytochrome, this is almost impossible…the light you would use to measure it, causes it to change to the other form! It is elusive!
Back to the lettuce, obviously the garden problem is planting the seeds too deep (in the dark!). Without light to photo-activate seed germination, the seeds fail to germinate to their potential. In the dark, the ratio of Pfr to Pr determines whether each seed will germinate. If exposed to red light, the phytochrome is all converted into Pfr and the seeds germinate. When the seeds are exposed to far-red light, the phytochrome is all converted into Pr and the seeds fail to germinate. Obviously the active form of phytochrome is Pfr.
Posted in Gardening, Spring gardening | Tagged: Danomanno, Forsythkid, Lettuce germination, Romaine lettuce | Leave a Comment »
My Chicken Wire Spud Enclosure Thing
Posted by forsythkid on March 11, 2010
Posted in Gardening, Raised beds, Spring gardening, Vegetables | Tagged: Danomanno, Forsythkid, potatoes, Raised beds, Southwest Missouri | Leave a Comment »
Tuber Planting Heaven is Nigh!
Posted by forsythkid on March 5, 2010
As spring gets ever closer (it’s March 5th as I write this), it’s time to begin thinking about those first vegetables of the gardening season. Potatoes are among the best vegetables to grow and they deserve your consideration. As a died-in the-wool gardener and shopper, I’m hoping to get a few seed potatoes from the local market this weekend. The Home Depot where I live in Branson Missouri seems a good bet.
I have my trusty soil thermometer ready to go. As soon as soil temperatures reach about 50°F, seed potatoes can be planted. Currently, the temperature where I plan to plant is at 49F so it’s close. Some gardeners use cold frames or high tunnels. Not me! I’m going for the ‘close to the house plan’ this year. I just need to be careful to protect the young plants from freezing temperatures which can still happen at any time. (Note: If you are planting in the open field, you should consider waiting 2-4 weeks before the last frost in your area).
Once I get my seed potatoes, I plan to pre-sprout them for a couple of weeks before planting. This will give them a boost for earlier and maybe larger production ratios. Pre-sprouting is accomplished by placing the potatoes in a warm room (>50°F) until sprouts are observed on the tubers. You also will need to consider using indirect, medium light to form tougher sprouts. These will have a higher chance of survival. That’s the theory anyway.
Note that you can plant either seed pieces or the whole potato. If the seed stock is small (size of an egg or less), whole ones can be used. Larger seed potatoes can be cut in slices having 2 or more eyes or buds per piece. (Since the potato is a root crop, the soil needs to be loose and friable for good growth). The optimum pH is around 5.5 to 7.0.
Speaking for myself, I prefer to plant potatoes on a raised bed that keeps the soil both warm and well-drained. Just make a 6” deep trench and plant the seed pieces or whole tubers about 12” apart. Cover the seed with 2-4” of loose soil. When the potatoes sprout or when they get a few inches above the soil, then rake some additional soil into the trench, making a small hill. Compost can be added and mixed with the soil prior to planting, or some may apply about an inch of compost after the potatoes have emerged from the soil. Take your pick. The nice thing is that this hill method of potato culture provides more than enough soil to form well-shaped tubers while preventing them from being exposed to sunlight that can make them green and inedible. Yuk!
As always, I will do updates through the growing season.
Posted in Gardening, Spring gardening | Tagged: Danomanno, Forsythkid, Gardens, Seed potatoes | 3 Comments »
The Actual Cost of Vegetables at the Store
Posted by forsythkid on March 1, 2010
I though it might be interesting to take a look at the actual cost of certain vegetables I pay for at the grocery store. I was amazed to find that no one seems to be tracking this sort of stuff. At least I couldn’t find very much on the internet.
So, I’ve elected to try and track what I’m paying at a local chain store for select items. The list will include the following; Broccoli, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, onions, peppers, green beans and Bell peppers. I think this list is representative of some of the stuff I like to grow in the garden each year.
My purpose in doing this is to provide a record of produce costs and to see where I want to concentrate my growing efforts. I’d like to grow veggies that cost a lot and perhaps save a few bucks in the process. I’ll try and append monthly updates to this blog over the course of a few months to get a feel for the average cost of each item in the list.
All costs will be expressed both in the unit in which they were purchased (a bag of potatoes) and in a cost per pound. So, a head of lettuce that might go for $1.39 per head will be also expressed in its true weight. This will allow an ‘Apples to Apples’ comparison as it were. Finally, wherever possible, I plan to buy the produce that is packaged in the cheapest manner. This means buying a 5 pound bag of potatoes rather than each one individually. The only cravat is that I will keep the proportions consistent with what an average family would purchase. In other words, I’ll confine myself to buying a head of lettuce as opposed to a crate of lettuce just to try and save some money. (Anyways that much lettuce would just rot away before I could eat it all).
So, for the beginning of the month of March, 2010, this is what I paid for vegetables at a chain store in southwest Missouri. If, anyone in another part of the country wants to post their costs in the comment section please feel free.
I will followup with another report this coming fall to compare prices.
Here is a followup done on May 11th.
Another update:
Posted in Carrots, Danomanno, Gardening, Green pepper, Lettuce, Vegetables | Tagged: Carrots, cost of vegetables, cucumbers, Danomanno, Forsythkid, Lettuce, Onions, peppers, potatoes | 1 Comment »
