So you've made some charcoal.  How do you get it into the soil in such a way that it helps your plants grow?  The embedded video in this post walks you through using biochar in your farm or garden.

While hanging out with other farmer geeks last week, I discovered that there is a cool new cover crop making the rounds --- radishes.  Everyone's glowing about the way tillage radishes, oilseed radishes, groundhog radishes, fodder radishes, forage radishes, and daikon radishes mellow clay soil, adding copious amounts of organic matter and tilling through hardpan.  If you play your cards right, you can even graze your livestock on the radishes a time or two during the fall since most of the cover crop biomass comes from the roots.  What really caught my interest, though, is news that these cover crop radishes winter-kill here in zone 6, meaning that they work perfectly with no-till systems.

I clearly had to give a radish cover crop a try, but which one to choose?  A little research made the choice simpler since all of the names I listed in the last paragraph refer to the same species (Raphanus sativus.)  Now, to be fair, cabbage, broccoli, and collards are all members of Brassica oleracea, so it's clearly possible to come up with multiple subspecies that act quite differently.  But in the world of cover crop radishes, there is really only one huge distinction --- the daikon radish has been bred to be eaten while all of the others have been bred primarily for biomass and are types of oilseed radishes.  Groundhog radish and tillage radish, specifically, are terms that plant breeders have trademarked for their line of oilseed radishes.

The differences between the varieties seem to come down to the roots.  Many people want a long, thin taproot like that found in the tillage radish, but we don't have hardpan, just heavy clay, so I chose to go for a more branched root instead.  That said, cover crop radishes are so trendy that the ones I wanted the most were sold out and I had to settle for a generic oilseed radish from Johnny's Select Seeds.

Before you go out and seed your front lawn with radishes, though, I should warn you of one factoid I noticed on every website.  When oilseed radishes freeze and rot over the winter, the resulting smell is quite foul.  Maybe it's best not to plant them beside your front door.

The internet is chock full of articles glowing about biochar's potential, but I seldom find any useful, hands on information.  The Abingdon Biochar presentation we attended delved into the nitty gritty.

Today's video highlights methods you can use to make biochar on any scale.  I was especially intrigued by the idea of modifying a rocket stove to produce biochar while cooking your dinner.

Part 2 of our biochar video series covers the benefits of biochar.  One backyard enthusiast calls the charcoal "condos for microbes," and biochar also has a host of other beneficial properties in the soil.  Julie Major from the International Biochar Initiative and Rory Maguire from Virginia Tech point out biochar's most impressive features in this short video.

I've been known to tell people that swiss chard is the easiest vegetable to grow since nothing seems to eat it.  I won't be saying that anymore. 

You see, an absolutely adorable, striped insect showed up around the swiss chard this summer, and I left the critter alone because it was so cute.  Only weeks later did I catch the chomper in action and figure out why it was so plump.

The disillusionment made me so mad at my buddies that I smashed every single one, so I don't have a photo to show you (nor can I figure out what the bad bug was.)

Even though it set me way behind my frozen greens allotment for the summer, my swiss chard insect taught me a good lesson --- identify, identify, identify!  Now, whenever a new insect shows up in my life, I pull out the books and figure out what it is right away.

During my weekly bug picking and smashing expedition Monday, I came across these fascinating grey scales shingling a dead asparagus twig.  Ten minutes later, I knew that they were mostly harmless --- just katydid eggs to serenade me to sleep next year.  Thank goodness!

Although we clearly got a lot out of visiting Abingdon Organics, our real purpose was to listen to several biochar experts talk about charcoal's potential as a soil amendment.  The seminar turned out to be the most exciting presentation I'd attended in several years, so I was glad that Mark filmed the whole thing.  Once we got home, I edited the video down into bite-size segments for your lunchtime enjoyment this week.

Today's video is an introduction to biochar.  What is it?  Does it occur in nature?  Is biochar the same as terra preta?  Watch the video and find out.

The last video in this week's lunchtime series may be too scientific for some of you, but I highly recommend it to folks who are serious about giving biochar a try.  Ken Revell, graduate student at Virginia Tech, is experimenting with turning overabundant poultry litter at commercial chicken farms into biochar.  He'll tell you precisely how much biochar is beneficial in soil and why it shouldn't be applied beyond a certain rate.

In my opinion the biggest benefit you can gain from growing your own food is the ultra freshness, which removes all the middle men involved in conventional food production.

I think it may be one of the most efficient ways to reconnect more with the rhythm of nature.

For me the change was gradual and I didn't notice the full impact of the reward until about the 2 year point of my  WaldenEffect journey.

Roland sent me a link to an intriguing article in the New York Times called "Math Lessons for Locavores."  The author argues that locavores need to take a harder look at the facts and realize that the distance food travels before it reaches their plates accounts for only 14% of the total energy costs of their eating habits.  While I like Stephen Budiansky's focus on numbers, the author's conclusion doesn't make as much sense to me.  He ends his article by saying, in essence, that our current agricultural system is just peachy.  I couldn't agree less.

Here's a quick example to help you see one small reason why I think that even mainstream organic farming is fatally flawed.  While touring Abingdon Organics, I was shocked to hear that Anthony tosses 200 pounds of culled tomatoes and peppers in his compost pile every week.  Mark and I once attended a few meetings as potential growers for Anthony's organic gardening marketing association, and I can personally attest that those culls aren't nearly as bad as the tomato I chewed Mark out for throwing to the chickens a few weeks ago.  Chances are, the culled vegetables had a slightly odd shape, were too big or too small, or had a minute blemish.  A hundred years ago, those culls would have been known as "food", or, at the worst, would have fed pigs or chickens that would quickly become human food.

In my opinion, the problem with mainstream agriculture is not the miles food travels to get to our plates; the problem is sheer size.  Over the last hundred years, farmers have been forced to grow food on larger and larger acreages or go out of business, with the result that they simply cannot keep the farm ecosystem balanced.  Pollution from concentrated animal feeding operations is yet another example.  Just as today's culls used to turn into yesteryear's soups, today's problem manure used to be yesteryear's black gold.

Although the average eater can't shut down factory farms or change the policies that make the typical American farm a 400 acre monoculture, we can take simple actions that will start to change the system.  Forget the greenwashing labels on the food from the grocery store and start thinking about your own growing, cooking, and refrigerating habits.  In "Math Lessons for Locavores", Stephen Budiansky wrote that 32% of food energy costs come from refrigerating and cooking that food at home.  If you grow your own vegetables, you won't need to run one of those huge refrigerators that grace the modern home --- you just take the food out of the garden, cook gently, and throw it on your plate, putting the leftovers in a smaller, energy-efficient model.  A rocket stove is on our winter project list to further lower our energy footprint.

Truthfully, though, I think that even those steps are a bit cosmetic.  The real way to make your eating habits an asset to the planet rather than an oozing sore is to grow your own food on a small enough scale that you can put all of the "waste" back into the farm to feed the soil.  Although you don't hear it bandied about much, I see no reason why adding compost to your soil and growing cover crops wouldn't count as carbon sequestration --- after all, humus can take up to a thousand years to decompose.  Add in some livestock to make the ecosystem more complete, and you've got a simple permaculture farm that feeds butterflies and birds as well as humans.

If growing your own food is so great, why don't we see more people jumping on the bandwagon?  Well, there's very little profit in it, for one thing, so marketers feel no need to spread the word.  Growing your own food also takes time and effort, and we're all inherently lazy people who would far rather think we were changing the world by paying double for a zucchini marked "organic" than putting down a kill mulch in the backyard and getting to work.  To top our reasons off, everyone knows that the average American is far too busy to commit 15 hours a week to growing crops, even though we easily spend that much time in front of a TV.  And, heck, what can one person's actions do?  How quickly we forget that during World War II, little backyard victory gardens produced 40% of Americans' food.

I'll step down off my soapbox now.  Thanks for reading a post that got way too long!  Feel free to tear my reasoning apart in the comments.

One of the first aspects to catch your eye at Abingdon Organics is half a dozen high tunnels.  Anthony Flaccavento uses these 150 foot long hoop houses to give his plants a head start in the spring --- his secret to having May tomatoes without heating a greenhouse.

The first high tunnels at Abingdon Organics were purchased for thousands of dollars apiece, but the newest hoop houses are DIY versions.  Imagine 4,500 square feet of protected growing area for just $900.

Anthony and his farm manager built the DIY high tunnels from locust posts, a steel purline, PVC pipes, brackets, and a huge sheet of plastic.  Clearly, the hoop houses are still being perfected, and Anthony noted that he lost two during heavy storms this summer.  Still, at a cost of only about 20 cents per square foot, his high tunnel design is definitely worth continued experimentation.

Mark's ears perked right up when Anthony started discussing homemade hoop houses, but I had to point out the negatives.  Like any greenhouse or other protected area, Anthony's high tunnels become breeding grounds for molds and spider mites.  Mark's rebuttal is that we could easily build a small, movable unit that was just used to give the tomatoes a couple of months' head start.  Clearly, cheap, DIY high tunnels are making their way onto the drawing board.

Wednesday, Mark and I attended a riveting presentation about biochar at Abingdon Organics, the home and farm of Anthony and Laurel Flaccavento.  The first time I toured Anthony's farm, I was blown away by his experiments, and by the colors and sheer beauty of his crops.  I figured there was no way I could ever achieve such perfection.

Even though he's still head and shoulders above us, I actually felt a little better about my own garden after this visit.  Anthony's tomatoes were keeling over even faster than ours (although he had been eating them since May) and he told us that this was the worst year he'd ever seen for Mexican bean beetles.  I guess misery loves company....

On the other hand, Anthony never throws in the towel, even when faced with total bean defoliation.  He discovered that you can buy a parasitic wasp (Pediobius foveolatus) that will lay its eggs inside the bean beetle larvae and wipe out your infestation...at least for a season.  The brown larva shown here is a parasitized bean beetle that won't do any more eating on Anthony's beans.  (In the background, you can see a yellowish, unparasitized larva of the same age.)

Unfortunately, Pediobius wasps are tropical imports and won't overwinter in our climate, so you have to keep buying them each year, making the proposition less sustainable than I would like.  Still, if you're dying to grow beans and the Mexican bean beetle is your archnemesis, you should give Tom Dorsey a call at 609-530-4192.  He doesn't appear to have a website, but is Anthony's wasp source.

Stay tuned for more tidbits from our exciting day in the big city (and, hopefully, a lunchtime series on biochar!)  Meanwhile, I have to end with another highlight of our trip --- meeting two loyal blog readers who came over to compliment us on the Walden Effect.  Thanks for your kind words, Rocky (and sister, whose name I didn't quite catch.)

This is Spike, it was nice of him to help me smooth out our 4th load of chicken manure compost.

It took the previous 3 loads for me to wise up to the idea of covering the entire truck bed with a large tarp, which most likely helped to save several 5 gallon buckets worth from blowing away during the trip back.

"Did you know that we're forecast to have a warmer than average fall this year?" I called to Mark as he set out to work on the shed's roof.  Mark came in and looked over my shoulder at this prediction by Weather Services International that forecasts abnormally warm temperatures through November everywhere in the U.S. except on the Pacific coast.

"What would you do differently if you knew the growing season was going to extend for an extra month?" Mark probed.  Well, that was easy --- I would start a lot more of the fall crops that didn't come up in the dog days' heat, tricking them into germinating indoors in flats then transplanting them to the garden.

Our traditional first frost date is October 10 --- 46 days away --- and I need about 55 to 70 growing days to make it worthwhile to replant all of the roots and cabbages that failed me in the garden.  Even that is an optimistic estimate, since you should usually add two weeks to the "days to harvest" on your seed packet when planning fall crops to take into account shorter days as the year fades.  I figured there was no way fall crops would have time to mature if I planted them this late, so I assumed we'd just make do without them.

But what if the killing frost really did hold off for an extra few weeks?  Isn't it worth wasting a dollar's worth of seed on a gamble if you could instead win a bushel of carrots, beets, cabbage, broccoli, and turnips?  I wonder what it says about me that I would never buy a lottery ticket but have no problem gambling on the garden?

Although I thoroughly enjoyed last week's deluge, the tomatoes didn't.  I had been keeping a pretty good handle on the early blight, but several days of damp spread other fungi and I can tell our tomatoes are now on the decline.

The pictures at the top of the post show our new septoria leaf spot infection.  At a quick glance, these spots look a lot like early blight, but notice that the septoria spots are smaller, more numerous, have a pale center, and aren't ringed by a halo of yellow.  (There is some yellowing on the leaf, but it doesn't encircle the spots.)

Meanwhile, late blight has struck as well.  About a third of the leaves on a couple of plants have curled up and turned brown, and I'm beginning to see rotten tomatoes on the vine.

Perhaps if the septoria and late blight had hit the tomato patch during dry weather, I would have been able to use extreme pruning to keep them at bay.  But somewhere in the course of last week's dozen inches of rain, the septoria managed to colonize every tomato plant in our garden, infecting even the upper leaves.  My only option is to harvest as fast as possible and accept that our tomatoes won't be much longer in this world.

Despite all of this death and destruction, I can't complain.  We're close to our goal of frozen tomato products --- enough to make pizza, spaghetti, and vegetable soup twice a month apiece for an entire year.  I was hoping to experiment with ketchup and add some dried tomatoes to the larder, but at this point I'm happy to take what I can get.

Several people have asked me, "Do I have to pull up my Egyptian onions and replant them every year?"  I'm not surprised that they ask --- even though Egyptian onions are perennials, the tops die back for about a month at the peak of summer and the plants look a bit dead.  But as August draws to a close, new green shoots poke up from the bulbs, proving that the onions are still very much alive.

In the past, I've yanked out the bottom bulbs during the dormant month and replanted top bulbs in new beds.  But the bottom bulbs don't rot in the compost pile, so I ended up with a lot of onions.  This year, I'm letting the Egyptian onion beds alone to see if I can treat them like true perennials.  The only problem I foresee is overcrowding --- each bottom bulb has now split into several new bulbs.  Since I yank whole plants now and then to make Butternut Squash and Egyptian Onion Soup, hopefully this overcrowding won't be an issue.

As a final note, we sold all but about a hundred of our onions, and I saved the last ones for a quick giveaway.  Just leave a comment on this post before August 29 and I'll choose one lucky winner at random to receive the last of our onion top bulbs.

Yes, the pictures don't lie --- I've been planting grass in our garden.  Perhaps an eighth of our garden beds are currently fallow, partly because I didn't water carefully enough and had a hard time getting my fall crops to germinate.  As August winds to a close, it's too late to replant the turnips, cabbage, beets, and carrots that had spotty (or no) germination.  Instead, I can double up on greens and lettuce, plan ahead for the fall garlic, and then fill all of the remaining beds with cover crops to improve the soil.

As you'll recall, buckwheat has been relegated to my list of cover crops that can't handle heavy clay and high groundwater --- the precise type of trouble spot I want to remedy with cover crop planting.  The next cover crop on my experimental list is oats, and already this grain seems to be growing much more hardily than buckwheat.  Hopefully, the oats will be winter-killed in a couple of months and will leave the beds happily mulched with straw of their own making.

I had some hull-less oat seeds leftover, but not nearly enough to sow all of the beds I was hoping to turn fallow for the rest of the summer.  After looking at shipping rates on the internet, I realized that cover crop seeds are best bought locally.  Our feed store had a 50 pound bag for about twelve bucks, allowing me to plant as heavily as I pleased with plenty of the moderately high protein grain left to feed to the chickens.

Last week, I wrote that I was concerned shelling tiny Urd Beans might be difficult.  I needn't have worried.  A few days later, when hot sunlight was streaming in the front window and across my pan of drying beans, I was startled by a loud pop.  "Huckleberry!" I exclaimed, sure that our spoiled cat had gotten into something he shouldn't have, but Huckleberry was asleep on the couch and the popping continued.

I eventually figured out what every Urd Bean grower out there already knows --- warm, dry weather will shell your Urd Beans for you.  When the pods reach a certain level of dryness, the two halves curl apart and the seeds explode out in every direction.  Picking another batch of pods this week, I had to carefully enclose entire fruits in my hand since even the gentle pressure of my fingers was enough to pop some pods open, just like pressing on a touch-me-not pod.

Green or damp pods don't pop on their own, but if you catch them during a dry day, you can gently roll a handful between your palms and remove the hulls from several pods at once.  Or just wait until the sun comes out and your kitchen turns into a rice krispies commercial --- snap, crackle, pop.

The good news is that closer inspection of our tomatoes shows they are infected with early blight, not late blight.  Notice the yellowing of the leaves and (not pictured) the absence of problems on the stems and fruits.  Although both are fungal diseases, early blight tends to be less devastating, and I'm having very good luck keeping the fungus in check with my blight control measures.

The bad news is that early blight tends to stick around after it shows up.  Unlike late blight, which needs living tissue to survive, early blight can overwinter in plant debris or even in saved seeds.  Although it pains me to remove biomass from the farm, we'll continue to take our blighted leaves to the dump.

This week, I ripped out another three tomato plants that showed too much damage to save.  But I can't complain, since the tomatoes have been pouring in.  Here's our August 6 harvest:

Then skip ahead a few days to August 10, and you'll notice I had to upgrade to the bigger basket:

No photos of the next few harvests, but suffice it to say that I'm now harvesting large masses of tomatoes three times a week.  We've already frozen a gallon of pizza sauce and three quarts each of spaghetti sauce and tomato-based vegetable soup.  When the peach leather comes out of the automotive dehydrator today, I plan to replace the fruit with a batch of sun-dried tomatoes.

The bad thing about procrastinating on mowing is once the "lawn" gets so high I can't run the mulch machine with the bag due to it bogging down.

It's much more powerful once you take the bag attachment off, but still has its limits.

I managed to supplement our butternut squash supply by about 35 various sized beauties grown by a friend of mine for the grand total of 20 dollars.

I also talked him out of this nice cedar table for an extra 50 bucks.

Our peach tree had another surprise in store for me.  I chomped down on one of its luscious fruits...and spit that bite right back out, along with the maggot happily consuming the peach's center.  Yes, nearly every one of our peaches has a little blob of gum on the outside marking the entrance path of these little, white larvae.

The first step in combatting any insect infestation is figuring out what you've got, but I had quite a time identifying my maggot.  My handy Garden Insects of North America narrowed down the playing field to a mere score of "fruit chewers": plum curculio, plum gouger, cherry curculio, speckled green fruit worm, peach twig borer, eyespotted bud moth, oriental fruit moth, navel orangeworm, lesser appleworm, cherry fruit-worm, mineola moth, cherry fruit sawfly, apple maggot, walnut husk fly, cherry fruit fly, western cherry fruit fly, black cherry fruit fly, chokecherry gall midge, European earwig, or green fruit beetles.

An expert at Bug Guide took a look and gave me a tentative ID of coddling moth or oriental fruit moth, the latter of which is more likely as a pest of peaches.  Although most of the mainstream websites tell me to spray chemicals on my tree, an Australian site recommends running chickens in the orchard.  I wonder if putting up a temporary fence around our peach trees and running chickens inside during critical periods in the spring and fall would be sufficient to cut down on our peach damage?

That Australian site (which I am thoroughly impressed by) also suggested some other permaculture style control measures for the oriental fruit moth. My favorite involves taking advantage of the fact that the moth goes through several generations in a year.  Before the fruit are large, the larvae instead grow inside twigs, which are highly visible because they wilt and produce gum.  By cutting off and destroying these infested twigs in the spring, you can cut back the population, which means there won't be adults present to lay eggs on your precious peaches.

A final method of control involves putting out artificial pheremones around the tree.  These pheremones mimic the scent emitted by the female moth when she's trying to attract a mate, so they disrupt the moths' mating behavior.  At four pheremone ties per tree, replaced twice a year, though, this method could add up.

Despite the problematic centers, our white peaches are growing on me.  I cut them in half and scoop out the bad spots, then gulp down half a dozen a day.  Now that they're at their peak of ripeness, I've discovered I prefer homegrown white peaches to storebought yellow peaches!

After carefully snipping butternuts off the vine and felling towering sunflowers with a single blow, it was time to harvest our experimental beans.  First came the garbanzos --- aren't they lovely?  The only problem is that what you see in this photo is nearly the entire harvest.  I'm not giving up on the variety, though, since a reader commented a few months ago to let me know that the extremely confusing instructions on the seed packet were really trying to tell me to plant the garbanzos at the same time as peas.  I planted them at the frost free date instead, so I'll have to give the crop a more fair shot next year.

Next stop "shelly beans", as folks around here like to call beans that you grow for drying.  The harvest in this bed was much better, despite the fact that bean bugs ate the plants down to nubbins...then moved on to my delightful Masai beans.  I'm tempted to blame the arrival of this new garden pest on the shelly beans, but I suspect that it just took the beetles a few years to find us.  Next year, I'll add the Mexican Bean Beetle to my list of bad bugs to squash weekly, and maybe all of our beans will do better.

Although the quantity of pods from the shelly bean bed was good, I discovered that I should have picked the drying beans much sooner.  Many people leave beans for drying to harden on the plant, but our climate is just too damp for that sort of harvest.  By the time I picked them, many of the older pods had begun to mold, and over half of the beans were discolored.  Next year, I'll harvest the beans when the pods are still slightly green, then allow them to dry inside, out of the weather.

Finally, I came to our Urd Beans (a variety of sprouting bean.)  I thought this bed was a goner after the deer nibbled it nearly down to the ground...then repeated the maneuver a week later.  But the Urd Beans have a saving grace --- bean bugs don't like them.  Despite the name "Bean", Urd Beans are in an entirely different genus than Phaseolus vulgaris (which includes green beans and the green-bean-like shelling beans I planted.)  Instead, Urd Beans (Vigna mungo) are in the same genus as black-eyed peas, a group that seems to be of little interest to our current crop pest.

I was also pleased to see that Urd Bean pods are hairy, a feature that seems to repel moisture, keeping the seeds inside dry even after the pods turn black.  I harvested half of the pods, leaving the green fruits on the vine to be picked at a later date.  The only problem I foresee with Urd Beans so far is their size --- shelling these little guys by hand would take all day.  (For a sense of scale, that's my thumbnail on the left side of the first picture of urd beans.)  I'm hopeful, though, that after I let the pods dry for a week or two, they'll be brittle enough that I can thresh them and then blow the empty pods off the seeds.

So, to sum up what became far too long of a post --- garbanzos need to be planted in early spring, shelly beans need to be harvested before the pods turn brown, and Urd Beans are my new favorite experimental bean.

Last year, oilseed sunflowers were an experimental crop for us, so of course the deer ate them and we didn't have any seeds to harvest.  Deer aren't so interested in the sunflowers this year, preferring to nibble our experimental beans, so I've been thrilled to watch these low-work vegetables do their thing.  The plants quickly shot up above my head, opened huge yellow flowers, and then dropped the petals as the seeds swelled up and the heads drooped under their own weight.

Some people advocate leaving sunflowers to dry in the field, but I know for a fact that our local wildlife would consider that a "free lunch" sign.  So as soon as the backs of the flower heads began to yellow and the tiny yellow disc flowers in the center of the "flower" easily rubbed off the black seeds, I snipped the tops off the sunflower stalks and hung them to dry under the porch eaves.

The harvest came not a moment too soon.  As I worked, a brilliant yellow goldfinch flew to one of the headless stalks and chittered at me.  "Hey, no fair!  I was counting on that to feed my family!"  A couple of hours later, he'd gathered his wife and brothers to peck seeds out of the drying heads, so I had to cover the whole mass with row cover fabric.  I hope he isn't bright enough to slip up underneath the fabric, but even so I'm considering rubbing the seeds out of the heads ASAP and putting them in a sealed container.

If I get my act together and buy or make an oil press, I'll let you all know how much oil you get out of two beds of sunflowers.  Or maybe I'll just save them and feed the high protein sunflower seeds to the chickens.

The BFR Mulch guy called this morning saying he could only deliver us 6 scoops of compost instead of the 9 that was mentioned last week due to the dump mechanism not being able to handle the extra weight.

I was thinking it was still a good deal that would save me from making 3 round trips to Norton. Add the travel time with the time to unload each load and it equals up to somewhere over a day's worth of labor. The delivery charge was going to be 75 dollars.

I was very clear on the phone that I needed them to cross a creek and requested the 4 wheel drive Mitsubishi Fuso dump truck by name.

They made it as far as our ford when they had to stop and give up. It seems like someone decided to add a snow plow attachment that shrinks the clearance down to a paltry 8 or 10 inchs!

I can see how they would want to take advantage of this 4 wheel drive beast in the winter by pushing snow, but why not install it so that you could unbolt it for the summer? It was welded on and the only obstacle to getting the load back to our garden.

I almost had them dump the load out by our parking area, but decided that would be even more work loading back on the truck and then unloading it at the garden.

The driver was a nice guy and apologetic about the handicapped truck.

"I guess most people don't live this far back in the woods anymore these days?" I asked the guy while we puzzled over the problem at the creek.

I felt bad about sending him back with the full load, but even felt worse over the wasted morning with nothing to show for it. This still seems to be a good option for mulch and compost delivery, just don't expect them to go up any sort of hill or over a big bump.

"Look at all the butternuts I harvested, honey!" I said proudly.  "And we've got four more left in the garden."

Mark glanced over at my 22 pounds of butternuts and replied --- "Four more baskets?"  Shame-faced, I had to shake my head no.  I only had four more squash in the garden.

The truth is that when I planned our three butternut beds this year, I should have realized that Mark had turned a general preference for these winter squash into an outright craving.  Already, he's talking about buying some butternuts from a friend, and he has the right idea.  Now's the perfect time of year to stock up on any vegetables of which you have an unexpected shortfall (or ones that your husband suddenly decides he adores and wants three times as many of.)

If you planted your butternuts a bit late (which would have been smart), they might not be ready to harvest yet.  Wait until your vines are dying back, your fruits are fully tan, and the stems have begun to brown (but be absolutely certain to harvest before the first frost.)  Then carefully cut each butternut off the vine, leaving an inch of stem on the fruit.  Never toss the butternuts around --- even though they look hardy, they actually bruise quite quickly if treated harshly.

Some people wash their butternuts gently in a solution of bleach water after harvesting to kill off any fungi living on the skin, but I've had good luck storing our butternuts as is.  For best flavor, allow the squash to cure at 80 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple of weeks, then store in a cool (50 to 60 F), dry place.  We keep our butternuts in a kitchen cabinet and eat them until the middle of the winter...or until we run out.

Perhaps in other parts of the world, it's not considered abnormally dry when you've had a steady one inch of rain per week for most of the summer?  Around here it sure feels dry, though, after a month with abnormal highs in the nineties nearly every day.  The floodplain has dried up, meaning that even though there are puddles of water in the driveway, the ground between is hard rather than mud.  Perfect weather for hauling.

Last winter, when we were trying to ferry in building supplies through endless muck, Titus gently noted that she tries to do all of her hauling during the dry season.  So when we realized the driveway was firm enough to allow Joey's truck to pass through, we dropped everything from the list and instead focused on ferrying supplies into the farm.  That's why Mark went to town nearly every day last week, hauling in compost and mulch.  It wasn't photogenic enough to post about, but he also hauled out a year's supply of household garbage --- a truckload and a half full.

We hope to finish bringing in the year's supply of biomass this week, and also cut up and haul in firewood from deadfall trees along the driveway.  Round it all out with some lumber for the solar dehydrator and picnic table projects, and we should be done hauling for a long, long time.  I just thought you all deserved an explanation so that you didn't think we were on a crazy spending spree.

The new tomato support structure is helping our plants reach towards the sky.

This one is already over 7 feet tall, which might require a step ladder to harvest the ones up high.

The Master Gardeners of Santa Clara County in California evaluated 11 different ways to support tomatos and summed up the pros and cons of each in an easy to read report from 2001.

They used just over 100 varieties of mostly heirloom tomatos to finally get to the bottom of which system works the best.

"Lucy, where did you find a brand new tennis ball?" I asked our frugivorous dog, catching sight of a yellowish sphere in her mouth.  She dropped...the first peach from our kitchen window peach tree.  Then promptly gulped it down, pit and all.

I had smelled the scent of ripe fruit wafting from the tree as I walked past earlier that morning, but I was so sure the peaches weren't ripe.  You see, I had planted a Loring peach in that spot three years ago --- a yellow-fruited variety with a nice red blush on the skin.  And the fruits on my tree were steadfastly pale yellow with white flesh.

But Lucy likes her fruit ripe, so I went back to check again.  Sure enough, the peaches were just barely starting to ripen, even though the flesh was pale as can be.  What's the statute of limitations on complaining about being given the wrong tree variety?

The trouble is, I adore yellow peaches, while white peaches are considerably lower on the totem pole --- like the difference between strawberries and blackberries.  Luckily, I have another peach tree out back that's one year younger but already gave me four little peaches with great flavor and bright orange flesh.  By next year, I should be glutted with yellow peaches.  But what to do in the meantime?  Perhaps I need to check out some recipes for peach leather?  Now's your chance to shower us with your favorite peach recipes.

My last trip to BFR Mulch in Norton gave me a chance to ask the guy about delivery options.

It seems they have a small Mitsubishi 4 wheel drive dump truck that can haul 5 times what we can do in the truck. The delivery fee is 30 dollars from Norton to Coeburn, which is about the half way mark for us and why the guy guessed the charge to be around 60 bucks for our zipcode.

The final element of our tomato campaign is "never waste a tomato."  Mark and I completed our vine-ripened versus indoor-ripened tomato taste test last week, concluding that the former had just a hint of extra flavor.  Still, the kitchen-ripened tomatoes were ten times better than storebought.  So when I had to pull out three blighted tomato plants last week, I first picked every tomato that had at least begun to whiten and am now ripening them under the kitchen counter.

Meanwhile, fruits with a bit of blossom end rot or a cosmetic crack are fine additions to sauce --- just slice off the troubled spot.  On the other hand, our volunteer tomato plant turned out not to be worth saving even under these drastic conditions.  I suspect the volunteer came from a storebought tomato seed, because fully two thirds of the fruits that I left on the vine to ripen rotted before turning red.  I guess those hard, pink tomatoes in the grocery store don't ripen all the way, no matter what you do.  That vine came out to give more space to its neighbor.

Our back garden is a trouble spot.  As I've mentioned before, previous owners had a pasture there and I suspect allowed all of the topsoil to erode away.  What's left is dense clay over a high water table --- a recipe for crop failure.

And then there are the problems that are my own fault.  When I built the back garden's raised beds, I believed it was best to merely scoop up the topsoil from the aisles to create the beds.  But there was so little topsoil present that the beds turned out to be barely higher than the surrounding aisles.  A couple of years later, the beds have collapsed a bit more, which means that the grass and clover in the pathways encroach constantly on the "beds", and grass seeds also drift up into the growing area as a matter of course.  Yet more problems.

Again my fault --- I was new to pathway planning when I laid out the back garden, so for some reason I can no longer fathom, I created a checkerboard of tiny beds.  Mowing takes twice as long since you have to go across the garden horizontally, then again vertically.  Yuck!  Can you tell this is my least favorite gardening spot?

I took advantage of Mark's load of topsoil (aka "compost") to start fixing all of the back garden's problems.  First step --- merge all of the beds on a contour line into a single long bed by dumping topsoil in the dividing aisles.  Suddenly, I wanted two more truckloads of soil so that I could also build up the empty beds (which had been planted in buckwheat and are waiting to be planted in oats next week.)  My goal is to create a replica of my current favorite garden --- the mule garden --- with long raised beds at least six inches high.  Then I could start to consider the high groundwater a boon --- subirrigation!

I went back to BFR Mulch for two scoops of aged oak mulch today.

It's an excellent product that made Anna smile when she noticed the rich organic smell.

It was 21 bucks per scoop, which is about half of what The Mulch Company demands for their mulch which is made from pine.

I like to call step four in our campaign against the tomato blight "tomato islands."  While it's quite true that blight spores can travel up to a mile in damp weather, planting patches of tomatoes in different parts of the garden can be relatively effective in keeping the blight from spreading if the summer stays hot and dry.  So while our romas (and a few slicers) are all clumped together along the sunniest edge of the mule garden, I've got slicing tomatoes and tommy-toes in three other areas.  The ones in the far-off front garden still seem to be blight-free.

I'm also taking a page out of our neighbor's book.  Last year, while touring a friend's garden at the end of the summer, I saw that he had a healthy tomato plant  still spitting out fruits.  "How did you do that?!" I exclaimed, and he told me that he'd thrown some seeds in the ground in early June.  This year I followed suit and seeded three more tomato plants a couple of weeks after our frost-free date.  These late plants are starting to set fruits, and so far look pristine.  Perhaps they will give us a fall harvest?

While weeding the mule garden this week, I discovered an unintentional polyculture.  I had pulled out all the seed potatoes from my fall potato experiment because they weren't sprouting --- or so I thought.  It turns out that one potato was overlooked, and it popped up between the leaves of a watermelon I'd planted at the end of the bed.

Meanwhile, my primary purpose for the bed was to plant fall carrots.  I seeded three different beds with carrots this summer, but very few seedlings came up in two of the beds.  However, in my polyculture bed, the watermelon took off and ran across the carrot area, shading the soil and retaining enough moisture for the seeds to sprout.  All three vegetables seem to be growing quite happily together so far, though I recently moved the watermelon tendrils aside to give the baby carrots room to grow.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that the carrot seeds in the other beds may have had shoddy germination rates because they were a different variety than those sown in the polyculture bed.  I usually have very good luck with Jung's Sweetness hybrid carrots, but the pack this year seems to have been a dud --- germination was low in our spring carrot bed too.  Next year, I might change my loyalties to one of the seed companies recommended by Steve Solomon.

The agricultural extension websites are quick to tell you that no tomato variety is immune to the blight, but I've discovered that several are resistant.  In general, tommy-toes seem to fare quite well, losing the battle much later than the larger-fruited varieties.  On the other hand, the Green Zebra we were testing for the first time this year turned out to be the most blight-prone of any of our tomatoes --- we won't grow Green Zebra again.  So far, all of our other slicing tomatoes are faring pretty well.

The heart of our tomato patch is our romas, and I'm starting to get a feel for which roma varieties last longer when blight is in the air.  Large-fruited romas do the worst, and I don't think I'll even save seeds from Italian San Rodorta this year since the plants blight so quickly.  In contrast, the even more hefty-fruited Russian Roma plants are only barely blighted.  Yellow Roma and Martino's Roma are currently my roma winners --- the fruits are small, but they ripen quickly and copiously, and the plants are blight-free so far.

I suspect that if I tweaked my plantings to focus solely on the most blight-resistant varieties, the fungus might not enter our patch until weeks later.  Or not at all?

During World War II, 40% of American vegetables came from 20 million victory gardens.  With American men fighting abroad, women were raising their kids alone, working outside the home (to fill those men's jobs), and still finding time to till up their backyard and grow food for their families. 

(Doesn't that make you feel a bit silly for saying you don't have time to plant a garden?  There's still time to put in lettuce and greens for the fall, by the way.)

Posters like these from both World Wars admonished women to plant a garden, can and dry the excess, and never waste a crumb.  The propaganda definitely worked --- Americans ate potatoes instead of wheat so that the less perishable grain could be sent abroad, and they generally managed to subsist on what those remaining at home could grow.

As Sharon Astyk pointed out in her fascinating analysis of why and how we have been trained to believe that our individual consumer choices make no difference to the world, victory gardens are clear proof that your personal actions can have a worldwide impact.  Leading by example, you can even suck your friends and family into a mode of eating that is lighter on the earth.

But after the war ended, the propaganda took an abrupt about-face.  Suddenly, posters were telling us to buy, buy, buy!  And, once again, we followed along like sheep, dropped our shovels, and went out to spend some money.

While I'm tempted to talk here about our current government's admonitions to spend money to prop up our ailing economy rather than striving to become more self-sufficient, frugal, and debt-free on a personal level, I won't.  Instead, I think the takeaway message from the victory garden campaign is clear --- think globally, act locally.  If you believe that the environment would benefit from food grown in an ecologically conscious way, then look into permaculture and plant a diversified garden.  Anyone living anywhere can plant something, preserve something, and cut back on food waste.

To see the source of these posters (and peruse many more --- huge time sink, I warn you), visit Beans are Bullets, a website/exhibition put together by the National Agricultural Library. 

We tried a new mulch source that has more down to Earth prices than The Mulch Company... including a sale on compost for just 10 bucks a scoop.

Don't get too excited. Their "compost" was just aged wood chips mixed in with average looking dirt.

I still took 2 scoops because I wanted to believe the lady at the desk when she said it was just "pure aged wood chips", and I was a bit fatigued from following a map that was not quite accurate on what may have been one of the hottest days of the year.

I knew right away something was amiss when Anna didn't get that same giddy laughter of joy I've become so accustomed to when I bring truckloads of compost home.

"We can still use it for areas in the forest garden where the clay doesn't drain well," she said trying to make me feel better.

BFR Mulch in Norton has a distorted definition of compost, but I guess it's a subjective term that will vary from person to person. The stuff will make okay raised bed material, but was barely worth hauling home when you gauge it on the Anna meter.

They have aged oak mulch for 21 dollars a scoop, which is what we'll try next.

But what do you do if, despite preventative pruning, your tomatoes begin to show signs of late blight?  Rather than sticking your head in the sand the way we did last year, your best bet is to take decisive action immediately.  Single out any tomatoes on which the blight has progressed beyond the very lowest leaves and delete the entire plant.  Then clip off any blighted lower leaves on nearby plants.

During this extensive pruning expedition, you should wipe your clippers with a rag soaked in alcohol every time you move from one plant to another, or from a more blighted area to a less blighted area.  In addition, you shouldn't even think about going into a blighted tomato patch when dew or rain are heavy on the plants --- blight spores move around and germinate on wet surfaces.

This is also the one time I advocate removing biomass from the farm.  You should definitely not incorporate the blighted tomato residue into your compost pile, but I feel that it's dicey to even toss it off into the bushes at the edge of the woods.  Instead, I actually let Mark haul our blighted tomato parts away to the dump.

Finally, I take the first sign of blight as a signal to get realistic.  All of your hard work pruning off diseased foliage is not going to cure your tomato patch of the blight --- it will merely slowly the disease's spread.  You might be able to stay ahead of the blight for a while by removing any yellow or brown leaves, but you'll have to stay vigilant.  So harvest while you can!

Stink bugs are usually bad news in the garden.  They suck the juices out of your plants and the chickens won't even eat them because of the noxious fluid they squirt out when disturbed.  But if I'm honest, my antipathy toward the insects dates from childhood.  You see, stink bugs love blackberries, and so do I.  Pop a blackberry in your mouth without looking and there's a good chance a stink bug might come along for the ride, leaving the most awful taste in your mouth imaginable.

Despite my scarred childhood, stink bugs have now been redeemed in my eyes.  I was out on my weekly bug-picking expedition Monday, squashing asparagus beetle larvae and tossing all of the other bad bugs into a cup of water to give to the chickens.  Guess who was already helping with the asparagus beetle control?  This predatory stink bug uses its long proboscis to spear insects and drain them dry rather than sucking a plant for lunch.

I'm glad I decided to use manual control this year on our insects, even though it is a bit of a pain to pick bugs for an hour a week during the growing season.  I've noticed spiders, ladybugs, and now this stink bug moving into the asparagus, keeping the beetle populations in check.  Maybe in a few years, our beneficial insect populations will be so healthy that I won't have to hand-squash larvae?

Last year, the blight took me by surprise and sent me reeling.  Since then, I've done a lot of plotting and researching, and I feel like I have the possibility of harvesting a crop after the fungus hits.

I've talked about our extreme tomato pruning before, but I want to add a few notes since I can already tell that I'll be pruning slightly differently next year.  Most importantly, I plan to snip off the bottom leaves repeatedly rather than spending my weekly pruning sessions solely cutting back suckers and tying up the main stems.  I've noticed that even leaves attached a foot above the ground bend downward with age until they are dipping into the splash zone.  Unsurprisingly, the first symptoms of the blight show up as yellowing and browning of these leaves --- a sign that fungal spores are being exposed to the air.  In the future, I'll clip off low leaves as soon as they droop.

Congratulations to Bladerunner, the winner of our most recent giveaway!  Bladerunner, drop me an email with your t-shirt size and we'll get your prizes out to you as soon as possible. 

Thanks to everyone who helped spread the word!  Don't despair if you didn't win --- we'll start up another giveaway before long.

Since this is a light post, I thought I'd throw in a photo I've been saving for a couple of weeks.  There's not really much to say about it, except that succession planting corn is the best way to sweeten dinners all summer long.  Sweet corn patch part two is about to hit the plate....

Although The Mulch Company has a fine product with great service, we've decided their price is too high.

Anna's mulch instinct is telling her we can get more for less somewhere else, and when it comes to mulch I choose to yield to her organic intuition.

Everett and Missy (from Living a Simple Life) were kind enough to invite us over to their new homestead for lunch on Saturday and I leapt at the offer.  There are few things I like better than a farm tour --- a great chance to walk around someone else's operation and get ideas.

The farm was beautifully manicured (way out of my weed-overgrown league), and I'm sure lots of you would love to see pastoral photos.  However, being who I am, I took a few pictures of the chickens and then a whole bunch of pictures of the garden.

Everett and Missy made the wise choice to spend their first year on the farm focusing on infrastructure, but they didn't ignore the garden entirely.  Instead, they planted a few cucurbits down by the creek, hired a nearby farmer to plow up a field to plant a clover cover crop in a second area, and then spread thick straw mulch over a third area.

This third area, of course, was the one that caught my eye --- a patch of lawn being transformed into a budding Ruth Stout garden.  Mushrooms were already hard at work improving the soil, and worms had clearly been attracted to the moist, bare soil beneath the mulch.  The couple's free range Buckeye chickens loved scratching up the mulch to find critters...and depositing their own organic fertilizer in exchange.  I wouldn't be surprised if this plot turns into a bountiful and trouble-free garden next year.

Of course, we didn't escape the farm tour entirely unscathed.  Like they say, August is the only time you have to lock your car in Appalachia --- otherwise, you'll come back to discover it full of zucchinis.  Thanks for the produce, the delicious lunch, and the tour!

The tobacco hornworm is easily confused with the closely related tomato hornworm.  Both caterpillars are the larval form of hawk moths, and both like to nibble on your tomato plants, but the tobacco hornworm has seven white lines running down each side of its body while the tomato hornworm instead has eight Vs.

Some gardeners resort to hand-picking their hornworms, while others believe that planting marigolds or basil between their tomato plants keeps the pests at bay.  I just ignore the hornworms of both types.  In our diversified environment, parasitic wasps quickly lay their eggs in each plump hornworm, and the wasp larvae eat the caterpillar alive from the inside out.  By the time these white cocoons show up on the back of the hornworm, he has long ago stopped nibbling on my tomatoes, so I am careful to leave hornworms like this in place to hatch out the next generation of parasitic wasps.

(I know I left you hanging about the tomato blight.  It turned out I had too much to say to fit in one post (surprise, surprise), so you'll hear all about it in a lunchtime series next week.)

It's never a good idea to hide things from your spouse, but I'd been keeping something from Mark.  When he tossed a half-rotten tomato to the chickens, the truth came spewing out.

"You can't give tomatoes like that to the chickens," I admonished him.

"There was barely anything left," my sweet husband explained.  "Just a bite for each of us."

"No, you don't understand," I said.  "I'll cut off bad spots.  Any tomato is precious.  You see, the blight has struck."

I knew that our tomatoes had a high likelihood of contracting the blight this year even though I planted them on the far opposite side of the garden from last year's tomato patch and pruned them heavily to promote air movement.  Once the blight is in the air, you tend to see symptoms the next year no matter what you do.  The trick is to be proactive and stay ahead of the disease.

I could have dusted my tomatoes with copper and prevented the blight, but this "organic" treatment seems too harsh for my garden.  Instead, I plan to yank out the worst plants and cut off diseased leaves as soon as we have a day dry enough to make it safe to work in the tomato patch.  Meanwhile, I picked a bowlful of ripe fruits to save tomato seeds for next year.

What do you do with a bowlful of gutless tomatoes?  Make pizza sauce of course!  That pizza I've been craving for the last few months really hit the spot.

We picked up our 2nd truckload of mulch for the year today.

This time the guy managed to fit 3 scoops in the truck, which was a little priceier than the first load, but well worth it when I saw the look on Anna's face.

Our buckwheat experiment is not what I would call a success.  The best thing I can say is that our bees did really enjoy the flowers.  And the plants do bloom, as promised, a scant month after planting.  But all of the biomass that was supposed to be ready when the plants bloomed?  Nope, not so much.

Buckwheat doesn't like heavy clay soil, which is the precise kind of soil I was asking it to rejuvenate, so I shouldn't blame the failure entirely on the crop.  And, to be fair, a deer came through for a midnight snack a few weeks ago and clipped the tops off plants in a couple of beds.  Those buckwheat plants never recovered, and weeds quickly sprouted up to fill in the bare soil.

Still, I would have expected a bit more growth out of the cover crop.  When I mowed down the buckwheat, it seemed like the succulent stems disintegrated into a mere handful of plant matter --- and that was in the beds that escaped deer damage.  I may give buckwheat another shot in the loam of the upper garden, but our troublesome back garden is going to need another cure.  Next try --- hullless oats.

One of the casualties of last year's big winter storm was our high fence to keep deer out of the mule garden in case one of the deer deterrents fail.

I finally got around to repairing the damage last week and decided one of the upper gaps was big enough for a deer to jump through. An experimental solution was to use some of this orange marking tape to deter any possible breach.

I know a deer could rip right through this thin plastic ribbon material, but if he or she does the evidence should be obvious, and then I'd know if this was a failure.

If it does prevent deer from thinking of jumping, then maybe someone else could use this as an ultra cheap fencing material that could be installed within a few hours depending on what type of posts or trees get incorporated.

Space in our freezer is suddenly starting to get tight, something that never happened last year.  Pretty soon, I'm going to have to make a decision --- stop freezing and start giving produce away, turn on one of our inefficient freezers, or buy another energy star model.  Such bounty!

I also harvested about half of our potatoes Monday because I needed the space for fall peas.  The average yield per bed was about 6.5 pounds (from about 1 pound of seed potatoes per bed.)  Yukon Golds aren't the most productive potatoes, but I'm still a bit blown away at the sheer mass of tubers I grubbed out of the soil.  If we had only a tiny bit of ground and were desperate to feed a family, potatoes would be the way to go.

At the moment, our potatoes are cooling it in our refrigerator's crisper drawer.  Even though we downgraded to a much smaller and more efficient fridge last year, I still run the fridge about half empty most of the time.  I'm a strong believer in keeping close tabs on leftovers and eating them within two days, so there's plenty of space for a few dozen pounds of potatoes.  Still, we're going to have to excavate the refrigerator root cellar soon and put it back to work --- I've got three more beds of potatoes to harvest, and the fall carrots are finally starting to germinate in the garden.

Remember how I told you that the deer ate our experimental beans?  It turns out I spoke too soon. 

I finally took a close look at our garbanzos and saw that they were liberally sprinkled with tiny pink flowers that are swelling into balloon-like fruits.

Meanwhile, our urd beans bounced right back and are now decked out in the fascinating pods to the left.  I assume I should leave both beans on the plant until they dry out, so I'm just watching them grow at the moment.

Another experimental crop also seems to be doing well --- our sesame.  Several of the plants have oddly twisted leaves that I suspect is the result of some sort of pathogen, but they're blooming and setting pods anyway.  It looks like at least three of this year's experimental crops will be successful.

Our tomato support structure is very different from last year.

We pruned for tall growth instead of bushing out, which seems to be working.

They've grown past the 5 foot posts so we started using long sections of rebar to encourage higher growth.

When I first got strawberries, I thought that since they were perennials, I could just eat fruits every year and mostly ignore the plants.  So I just picked off runners now and then, mulched, and weeded.  Along came the plants' second year of bearing, and the berries were not as tasty as I remembered.  What happened?

The problem turned out to be multifaceted.  I suspect that heavy rains last spring washed away some of the soluble minerals, resulting in a micronutrient deficiency.  But it didn't help that I'd let the beds become matted masses of plants and hadn't given the berries a good top-dressing of compost to make up for their hard work the year before.

I've now tentatively settled on a three year cycle for strawberries.  At this time of year, I pull out any beds that are three years old or older, then renovate the one and two year old beds.  Renovation consists of ripping up any runners I've let set between the parent plants and breaking off new runners starting to form.  Add a little manure and some grass clippings, and the plants are ready to soak up the rays in preparation for next spring's harvest.

While I'm renovating the middle-aged beds, I take a little care to dig up the best-looking runners and transplant them into new beds.  Transplanting strawberries in the heat of summer is a bit dicey, but the payoff is large --- you gain enough growth that you can eat plenty of berries from the beds next spring rather than picking off all the blooms and waiting until the second spring to taste the crop.  I've found that if I dig the roots up carefully enough, my transplants will wilt in the hot sun but will be putting up new leaves within a week.

My hope is that this three year cycle will keep me sated with my favorite fruit for years to come.  Only time will tell if this method needs more work, but strawberry yields this spring were heavy and delicious.  The proof is in the pudding* --- strawberry shortcake.

*The British use the word "pudding" to mean "dessert", in case this isn't clear.

While researching tomato blemishes, I stumbled across a piece of data that seems unbelievable to me --- vine ripened tomatoes taste no better than those picked at the first hint of red and ripened indoors.  Chuck Marr, the horticulture program leader at Kansas State University Research and Extension, says:

Marr says that you can avoid most of the cosmetic problems I discussed in this lunchtime series by picking your tomatoes early and ripening them in your kitchen out of direct sunlight.  The blogger who tipped me off to this process notes that storebought tomatoes taste awful not because they were picked too soon, but because they are a variety bred to be tough and easily transportable.

I think it's time for a taste test!  I've picked a couple of blushing tomatoes to ripen in the kitchen, and will report on our taste test in a week or so.  I hope some of our loyal readers will try it at home and report back too.

Green shoulders are the most purely cosmetic problem I'll discuss.  I have certain tomato varieties --- notably this yellow roma and our pear-shaped "black" tomato --- that ripen the bottom two thirds of the fruit quickly, but leave the top third green.  My solution, as usual, is to cut off the tops and give them to the chickens, but I was interested to discover there's a reason for the green shoulders.

Green shoulders form when tomatoes deal with high temperatures and strong sunlight during ripening.  The light and heat prompt the fruits to retain chlorophyll around the stem area, and the "shoulders" often become hard and leathery.

Unless you've pruned excessively and removed leaves that would normally shade your fruits, you haven't done anything to cause green shoulders.  And there's not much you can do to fix the "problem" either, short of ripening your tomatoes indoors or choosing a different variety.  This is definitely one of those times I'm glad not to be a market gardener whose customers demand blemish-free fruit.

Our garlic has had a good month plus of drying time hanging under the eaves, so I decided it was time to clean it up and move it inside for storage.  I took down our strands of garlic, rubbed the dirt out of the roots, and trimmed both roots and leaves back.  Next step was sorting --- I like to pull out the very biggest heads for planting, and at the same time I set aside the tiny or damaged heads for immediate eating.  We've saved lots of mesh bags from buying oranges and onions, so I popped each variety into its own bag and put the whole mess on our scales.

"How many pounds of garlic do you think we grew this year?" I asked Mark minutes later, wanting to brag.

"Six pounds?" was his less than ambitious reply. 

"No!" I hooted.  "25.5, plus whatever we've eaten in the last month."  Then, as the wheels turned in my head, I added "That's half a pound of garlic per week.  Do you think we grew too much?"

Mark got a puzzled look on his face --- clearly, the idea of too much garlic had never occurred to him.  "Of course not," he answered.  "You'd better get cooking!"  Garlic green beans for supper it was.

Cracking is probably the most common tomato blemish out there.  Like blossom end rot, split tomatoes are often the result of improper watering, but the symptoms usually show up when the fruit is closer to maturity.

At a certain point in the tomato ripening process, your fruit has achieved its full size and it toughens up its formerly stretchable skin.  If a heavy rain soaks the soil after the tomato epidermis hardens, the tomato can swell up further and crack its skin.  Alternatively, cracks sometimes occur when hot days are followed by cold nights, causing the skin to expand and then contract quickly.

My advice is about the same as it was for blossom end rot --- mulch if you're worried --- but I tend to think that cracking is just an inevitable fact of life.  I cut out hardened cracks and just eat soft cracks.  Life's too short to throw out a delicious tomato just because it has cosmetic damage!

I'm not sure why no one talks about planting sunflowers for their honeybees --- our bees adore them.  We put in two beds of oilseed sunflowers so that we could experiment with pressing our own oil this fall, but the flowers have already paid for themselves by feeding local pollinators.

During the day, it's not at all unusual to catch several honeybees on the same flower head, along with lots of smaller pollinators.  The action doesn't even stop when night falls --- yesterday, I snuck out at dusk and found a moth on every flower, each dipping its proboscis deep into the tiny florets opening around the circumference of the sunflower head.

On a semi-related note, if you're interested in native pollinators and have a bit of time on your hands, you might want to check out the Great Sunflower Project.  Just plant a Lemon Queen Sunflower seed, watch the pollinators flock to your flower for 15 minutes, and input your data to help scientists figure out how pollinator populations are doing in your area.  I suspect this project would be especially good for science-oriented kids.

If some of your tomatoes have a black spot on the bottom, chances are they've come down with blossom end rot.  This condition isn't something to be overly concerned about since it's not caused by a virus, bacterium, or fungus and won't travel beyond the fruit in question.

Technically, blossom end rot is caused by lack of calcium, but that doesn't necessarily mean your soil is low on the essential micronutrient.  A variety of other factors can reduce your plants' ability to take up calcium, including drought, damage to the plant's root system, excessive heat, or even rapid plant growth.

I'm not as careful as I could be about making sure my tomatoes always have an even supply of water, so I often find a fruit here and there that has succumbed to blossom end rot.  The affected plants are most common at the beginning of the season, and are more prevalent in certain varieties than in others.  If blossom end rot seemed to be excessively widespread in your garden, you should mulch your tomatoes to maintain an even supply of water in the soil and should take care not to overfertilize.  Otherwise, just cut out the spot and enjoy your homegrown tomatoes.

With tomato season officially underway, we're going to have to make some hard decisions.  Like --- now that our happy plants reach over my head, do I keep tying them up and harvest with a stepladder or do I let the plants hang down?

Or, how about this --- do we plan ahead for a future blight year and can some tomatoes as well as freezing them?

And --- what do I do with that first roma when it doesn't have enough sisters to make into sauce?

This week's lunchtime series doesn't actually answer any of those questions, but it does explore some of the cosmetic problems you might run into while wandering through your tomato patch.  I mentioned in an earlier comment that orange tomatoes are caused by high heat, and the truth is that tomatoes will complain about lots of environmental variations in several different ways.

I subscribe to the "eat it or give it to the chickens" school of thought, so discussing vegetable cosmetics is out of the ordinary.  But I recently realized that beginning gardeners might not know the difference between pissy tomato plants upset by two days without adequate water and blighted tomatoes that are going to wipe out your entire tomato garden.  If that describes you, stay tuned for a look at all of the tomato problems that aren't contagious and can simply be cut out of the ripe fruit.

This spring, I decided that broccoli is our most productive cool season crop per unit space, so I decreased our planned pea plantings and increased our broccoli plantings for the fall.  The broccoli came up quite well, although I did have to transplant a few seedlings that were too close together, filling in gaps where dry soil had prevented any broccoli from germinating. 

Since we gorged on broccoli this spring and still managed to put away two gallons of the florets, it feels a bit decadent to have planted half again as many broccoli beds for the fall.  However, the later in the year we can eat fresh produce, the healthier and happier we'll be.  I also like to keep the garden full and productive, and I know that my usual recipients of excess garden produce all love broccoli.

As a side note --- the freezer is nearly half full, and we're also halfway to our winter goal.  We've put away 9 gallons of vegetables as well as a good deal of pesto and homegrown chicken.  I can tell we won't be reduced to buying produce from the grocery store in March of 2011.

I like to pretend that our garden looks like the image above --- well-weeded beds separated by carefully mown aisles.  But at this time of year, a lot of it actually looks like this picture:

Yes, our garden is full of weeds.  We're slowly developing a mulching technique, but this year is a bit of an experimental year, so we haven't mulched nearly as much as I would have liked.  Instead, I weed the garden constantly, rotating through so that each area is weeded at least once a month.

Or at least that's the plan, which I manage to achieve in the spring.  By the height of summer, though, my rotation extends out to nearly two months, which is how long it's been since the portion of the garden in the second photo was weeded.  Luckily, our vegetables have grown tall in that span of time, so they don't seem to have been stunted by their weedy neighbors.

I've been reading Corn Among the Indians of the Upper Missouri (which may become a lunchtime series if I ever get my act together), and at first I was stunned by the traditional cultivation method the Native Americans employed --- plant and weed like mad until the entire garden has been weeded twice.  Then go off to hunt buffalo for the rest of the summer, returning just in time to harvest your corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers.  But the truth is that if you weed carefully when your vegetables are in the seedling stage, most veggies can quickly outstrip the weeds and form a leaf canopy that excludes competitors.  Sure, we might get a slightly higher yield if I weeded more obsessively, but there are only so many hours in the day.

The primary point of this post is --- don't feel bad if your garden is weedy!  We've passed the point of no return (July 4), so the worst that weeds can do to your garden now is seed a new crop of weeds for next year.  If you do your best to pull the weeds out before they fruit, I think it's quite all right to focus on the harvest.

I've had my eye on our oldest tomato plant for weeks.  (This is the one that volunteered in our lemon tree's pot this winter and which I set out in the garden on April 21, babying through cold spells.)  The plant swelled up huge fruits, then kept swelling more and more fruits, none of which changed color.  Last week, I saw the tiniest hint of red on the oldest fruit, and crossed my fingers.  But I was looking in entirely the wrong spot for our first tomato.

Wednesday morning, I caught a glimpse of orange from the tomato bed on the opposite side of the naughty butternuts.  I peered closer and saw a fruit nearly ripe!

A few years ago when we splurged on seeds for several heirloom tomatoes, I picked out Stupice as a very cold-tolerant and early variety.  Sure enough, it looks like the Stupice tomato will probably be the first one on our plate, perhaps by the end of the week.

To be fair, though, this mini-experiment doesn't prove that tomatoes started in a cold frame and set out at the frost free date ripen just as quickly as those started indoors and transplanted out three weeks earlier.  I have absolutely no clue what variety my volunteer belongs to, and I suspect it might have been the seed of a storebought tomato that made it into our neighbor's compost and thus to us.  At this point, though, I'm at the who-cares stage --- as long as I get a sun-ripened tomato shortly, experiments will fly out of my head.

This year, I decided I was going to wean us off Bt even if it meant a squashless season.  Maybe it's a fluke, but we've actually had a much better cucurbit year than ever before.  My new secret is succession planting.

Notice how the cucumber vine on the left is starting to wither up?  This time last year I would have been pulling out my hair, but now I simply shrug my shoulders and look at the bed of three week old cucumber plants nearly ready to bloom.  I plan to seed a third bed of cucumbers this week so that we'll have a final glut of cucumbers around the end of August.

I did even better with the summer squash.  Our four spring plants gave us nearly two gallons of fruits to go in the freezer (with who knows how many eaten and uncounted), but now the squash have collapsed into a mass of vine borers, squash bugs, and disease.  No worries --- check out our month-old youngsters who just gave us their first fruits.  Again, I've got more squash on my succession-planting list for this week to take over when our second planting bites the dust.

To be fair, succession planting isn't my only innovation this year.  I'm growing a different variety of cucumber (Diamant) and of summer squash (Butterstick Hybrid.)  I also gave our cucurbits quite a bit of extra compost so that they'd grow quickly and give us produce before disease and pests struck.  And the weather has been perfect --- droughty weather with us irrigating regularly.  Still, I think succession planting has been key in this year's success, and I suggest giving it a try before spraying Bt.

When I was a kid, we never cultivated brambles (blackberries and raspberries.)  Instead, we knew spots where big patches grew wild, and we'd go on a pilgrimage to pick by the side of a country road.  With such good wild berry patches, why grow your own?

Lately, I've decided that cultivated brambles do have definite advantages.  The large cultivated berries are quick and easy to pick, and in many cases taste as good or better than the wild berries.  You can grow thornless varieties (particularly of blackberries) to cut down on the scratch factor and everbearing varieties (particularly of red raspberries) that extend the bramble season from early summer through the killing frost.  If you find varieties well suited to your soil and climate, you can also expect much higher production out of cultivated brambles than out of wild canes.

Although cultivated blackberries and raspberries can be pricey, the frugal homesteader quickly learns that she only needs to buy one plant of each variety.  If the brambles like your garden, they'll grow so fast that you'll be overrun with offshoots to give away by the end of the second year.  (But do be prepared to run through a few varieties before you find one well suited to your garden.)

The only real disadvantage I've found with cultivated brambles is that they take up a good deal of space.  On the other hand, they tend to grow well in awful soil that wouldn't support anything else, and if you prune them ruthlessly (and mow up any shoots that wander out of their row), you can definitely keep brambles under control.  Our patch of blackberries and raspberries is the easiest and most productive part of our fruit garden so far.

We went a little overboard with experimental beans this year, and now we're starting to get an idea of which ones like our garden.  First of all, I should note that our old standby Masai Beans are still plugging right along.  We already have a gallon of delicious green beans in the freezer, with many more to come as my later-planted beds start to bear.  Masai Beans are really the best green beans I've ever tasted, and they're stringless, so preparation is a breeze.  Plus, you can save the seeds --- we haven't bought green bean seeds in three years.

On the experimental side, a friend of mine mailed me a few of her favorite dried beans to play with --- Yellow Indian (pictured above), Allubia Criolla, and Cayamento Cranberry.  My goal here is to find a dried bean that will capture even Mark's interest, and I'm willing to try as many varieties as it takes to reach that point.  Currently, the pole beans are happily running up their trellis, blooming like crazy, and setting big pods.  I won't really have information for you, though, until we run a taste test.

Our garbanzo beans are less happy.  I planted Black Karbouli Bush Garbanzo at the end of April, but later learned that garbanzos like cool weather and should be planted at the same time as the peas.  No wonder a third of my plants dried up and the rest have luxuriant foliage but no signs of blooms.  Even if we get nothing out of this experimental bed, I'll try the garbanzos again next spring, planting in a more proper time frame to see what develops.

We also planted Urd Beans (for sprouting) and some Endamame Soybeans (for endamame).  The two types of beans seemed happy as little clams...until the deer came in and ate them.  We had a few minor deer incursions this summer when deterrents went down, and our four-legged f(r)iends seem quite partial to my experimental crops.  So, just like with our garbanzos, if we fail to get a crop this year, I won't despair.

Now that we've done everything wrong that we possibly can with beans, I'm hoping next year will be a stunning success.  For the sake of comparison, oilseed sunflowers were one of our big experiments last year, so the deer ate them down to the ground.  This year, the sunflowers were no longer experimental, so the deer left them alone and the plants are now towering over my head.  Clearly, there is a moral here, if I can only figure it out.  Maybe the deer are bored by my experiments posts?

I've always thought the traditional pop up style campers had room for improvement.

The Yurtle will put an end to your square lodge blues with a nice circular structure to rest within. This portable model will run you about 6800 bucks, which seems comparable to other new pop up campers. The Yurtle will take at least an hour to set up compared to seconds on the pop up.

Seems like this might be a great alternative to the FEMA trailers we heard so much about after hurricane Katrina?

Go to Laurelnestyurts.com for more round options and details on their small community of 14 yurts. They've got a few sections to their blog where they discuss permaculture and gardening, topics that drove me to their site in the first place.

Last week, I noticed that the bottom leaves of our tomato plants were curled up.  The leaves weren't yellowing, browning, or developing spots; they were just bent in an odd curve that made the pale undersides visible.

Even though I usually try to be very proactive and look up problems as soon as I see symptoms, this time I procrastinated.  I've been living in fear of the blight all growing season, and, honestly, if my tomatoes were blighted, I didn't really want to know.

It turns out that I could have set my mind at rest days ago.  There is a leaf curl disease caused by the Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus, but the virus' symptoms include yellowing leaf margins and crumpled leaves, neither of which my plants show.  Instead, chances are my curled leaves are the result of letting the plants get a bit drought-stressed, then saturating the soil a bit too much, all combined with my new, drastic pruning regime.  The leaves may stay curled, but it sounds like I won't see any damage to the plants' growth or fruiting.

I'm very relieved that my tomatoes aren't going to die, but I would still like them to hurry up and feed me!  The plants are dripping with huge green fruits, but none has even shown a tinge of color.  As I read on more and more blogs about homegrown tomatoes, my patience is wearing thin.  Fresh sliced tomatoes, vegetable soups, sweet pizza sauce --- I'm aching to taste them again....

I seem to have slightly over-planted our Egyptian onions this year.  I only put in three small beds...and then three more patches sprang up from compost piles where I'd tossed the excess bulbs.  The result was so many onions that I didn't even put a dent in the population by pulling whole plants to eat over the winter, and now that it's time to harvest the top bulbs, I'm officially overwhelmed.  This basket is less than a third of the harvest!

Rather than composting the top bulbs (a method that clearly failed last year), I'm going to sell them in big bunches to anyone willing to start a good-sized Egytian onion patch.  I don't really want to get into the retail side of mailing off a few bulbs here and there, but if you're a regular commenter and just want a tiny start, email me and I'll likely oblige you.  You definitely want these plants in your garden if you grow in zones 3 through 9.  Sorry, I can't mail them outside the U.S.

To order, click on the paypal button above to buy 100 top bulbs for $25 (with free shipping.)  100 bulbs will weigh approximately 5 ounces and will be enough to start one good-sized bed that will feed one or two average people.  Your package will contain small, medium, and large bulbs.

If you really want to feed an army (and help me get rid of these top bulbs as quickly as possible), you can buy 500 top bulbs for $75 (with free shipping.)  If so, click this button instead.

Once you receive your bulbs, plant the Egyptian onions as soon as possible in good garden soil in full sun.  The very top of the bulb should be poking out of the ground, but the rest should be submerged.  Some people recommend planting them a foot apart, but I've found that my plants do well in raised beds spaced only about three inches between centers.  Leave the plants alone for a few months, then you should be able to start harvesting green onions in the middle of the fall through the winter.

To maintain a perennial patch, cut only every second or third leaf, making sure that the plant has enough green leaves to continue growing.  You can also dig up entire bulbs in the winter to use in recipes that call for leeks, but you'll want to let all your plants grow the first year.  By this time next year, your plants should be putting up top bulbs, each of which can be planted to expand your patch.  As long as you don't get too greedy and overharvest, Egyptian onions will soon become your most dependable --- and easiest --- vegetable.

I'm searching for a cover crop that:

• is reliably winter-killed in zone 6 (meaning that I don't have to till it in or pull it out)
• is non-leguminous (so that I'll get lots of organic matter rather than lots of nitrogen)
• will survive in our problem spots --- dense, clayey soil with a high water table
  

So far, buckwheat and oats seem to be my top contenders.  I've been slipping buckwheat into gaps in my rotation this month, beds where spring crops have been pulled out with nothing to take their place for at least six weeks.  Next month, I'll plant oats in empty beds.

If all goes as planned, our cover crops will turn into a heavy mulch that will partially or entirely decompose in time for spring planting.  It's even possible that the buckwheat will die in five or six weeks when I mow it down at bloom time, allowing me to plant garlic under the green manure a few weeks later.

Do you have a favorite no-till cover crop?  I'm open to any and all suggestions since this year is our first trial.

This weekend, I tricked Mark and his mom into taking me to Sunwatch Indian Village in Dayton.  My companions win the patience award for not even looking bored while I took notes for three hours on how Native Americans fed themselves 800 years ago.  Okay, maybe they do look a little bored....

I was intrigued by this particular window into the past because corn had just become the mainstay of the Native American diet, making up over half of the villagers' diets.  Meat (76% of which was venison) made up another 40% of their diets, so I wasn't surprised that the Sunwatch villagers were actually less healthy than their recent ancestors, with over half of their children dying before the age of six.  We all know that a diet of corn and meat with very few fruits and vegetables isn't going to promote good health.

The villagers stored their corn for the winter in large, grass-lined storage pits.  Each family of six to eight people had their own pit, which would hold 500 or more pounds of corn.  I loved the museum's reconstruction of a typical storage pit while in use:

...and then, once emptied of corn, how it might have looked when filled with the family's garbage...

...and, finally, what the pit looked like when archaeologists carefully picked through it 800 years later:

The reconstructed village also included a typical three sisters garden, which I've pictured here.  Unfortunately, there was much less interpretation about the garden than about the buildings, so I came away with more questions than answers.  Most importantly, I ended up curious about how the Native Americans combatted the squash vine borers, which my trained eye noticed were already hard at work wiping out the pumpkins in Sunwatch's garden.  Does anyone know?

I posted some images of the lodges in my review of Sunwatch Village over on our Clinch Trails website (which I've decided to reenvision as our travel website), but what caught my eye in the architectural arena was the way the Native Americans burned the bases of their posts to protect the wood from insects and rot.  I would have thought that charring the base of a post would make it less structurally sound, but presumably they knew what they were doing.

On the other hand, the buildings weren't meant to last forever.  Like my method of intentionally underbuilding, the Sunwatch villagers were used to moving on after a couple of decades when firewood and game in the immediate vicinity had been exhausted.  As with slash and burn agriculture, the sustainability of using up all of an area's resources and then travelling to a new region is questionable, but the method might make sense if populations are low enough that the land is given a century to recover after each episode.

Finally, doesn't this watch platform look perfect?  I've long wanted to have one of these in the middle of the garden with a ramp up to the platform so Lucy could nap there and watch over our entire domain.  Who knows --- the Sunwatch villagers might have even let their dogs stand watch there too!

My beekeeping mentor told me that he waits until June to plant most of his potatoes, which means he doesn't have to store the mature tubers during the heat of the summer.  Since potatoes are primarily a storage crop and have a limited shelf life, planting them as late as possible makes sense.

However, when I went shopping for seed potatoes at the beginning of June, all of the feed stores looked at me like I was crazy.  Instead, I decided to see whether I could just plant some of my halfway matured spring potatoes in new beds for a fall crop.

I was so happy with the Ruth Stout method of potato planting last time around that I decided to take it a step further this time.  I simply spread manure on a freshly weeded bed, plopped down the seed potatoes, and covered everything up with a thick layer of grass clippings.

Since then, I've been waiting, and waiting, and waiting.  Nothing has happened.  When I poked around under the mulch, I discovered that very few of the seed potatoes had sprouted.  In fact, all of the small new potatoes that I had put in the ground whole were sitting there, while only the few potatoes that were large enough to be cut in half had begun to grow.  I've read that some companies sell new potatoes as seed potatoes, but I clearly haven't discovered the trick yet.

Since the beds are well mulched and growing no weeds, I'm going to let them sit for another month or two even though I now have small hope of a fall potato harvest.  I'll let you know if anything exciting happens, or whether I end up just digging the seed potatoes to eat.

Even though I'm the primary cook around here, Mark does nearly all the grocery shopping.  I just hate shopping, so every two weeks, I hand Mark a list and send him to the big city.  He always comes home with everything on the list...plus this and that.  When I first started converting him to Walden Effect eating, the "this and that" were things like biscuits-in-a-can and lemon cookies.  Nowadays, I roll my eyes when he brings home...an out of season butternut.

Yes, we've become such fans of butternuts (especially butternut pie) that Mark's hard pressed to live without them over the summer.  I didn't know they would be such a hit, so I only put in two small beds last year, and we ran out of the delicious fruits in the middle of the winter.  This year, I expanded the planting to encompass three beds, and I fed the soil well.  Cucurbits love a good meal of manure, and before I knew it, the butternuts had zipped off their own beds, across the aisle, and were partying with the tomatoes.  Bad butternuts!

As every parent knows, proper limits are essential in raising a healthy child...I mean, butternut.  And parents definitely have to work together to set those boundaries.  So Mark and I went out as a team to train our recalcitrant butternuts to toe the line.  Mark hammered in fence posts and I strung up pea trellis material to cage our butternuts in.  Now they can play as hard as they want and we won't have to worry about them skipping curfew.

The biggest mistake I made with the do it yourself garden cart worm bin was to not allow enough space at the bottom for the tea to drip to.

The next error was to use a drinking container spigot as a drain valve. It needs to be bigger with the ability to be turned on and left on as opposed to the push button mechansim of the spigot.

The good news is that the worms did great! Which goes to show you how easy it is to grow your own worms. Once the kinks are worked out I think this garden cart will make a fine over sized worm bin. One that will provide buckets and buckets of compost tea in the future.

As long as you choose a non-hybrid variety, peas are one of the easiest garden vegetables for seed-saving.  To that end, I let the snow peas stay in the ground for a couple of weeks after the pods began to turn woody, giving them time to mature their seeds.

Last year, I left the pods on the vine until they were completely brown, but this year I'm experimenting with harvesting them a bit earlier when they're in the pale yellow stage.  My goal is to counteract the mildew that struck about a third of last year's seeds.  Rather than expecting the pods to dry on the plant like last year, this year I carefully shelled out the peas and put them on a rack to dry.

Davia asked me if I'd ever heard of Hugelkultur.  I thought the answer was no, until I googled the term and discovered that hugelkultur is very similar to the mounds I built last fall using dirt tossed over decomposing branches.  Putting a name to the method really expedited my research and turned up a lot more information than I thought was out there.  Thanks, Davia!

The idea is pretty simple --- adding wood to a raised bed acts as a sponge, evening out soil moisture so that the ground doesn't become waterlogged and also doesn't dry up.  As the wood rots, it turns into wonderful organic matter a lot like the stump dirt I rave about.

However, I think I made a few mistakes with my hugelkultur beds.  If you research the technique, you'll discover that the correct way to make the beds is to bury the woody material at least a foot or two under the earth.  I just built up piles of partly rotten branches and shoveled dirt in the gaps, a method that worked okay for the hazels and wildflower mixes I grew there, but that wouldn't have worked for vegetables.  I'm sure the branches are locking up nitrogen out of the soil as I type, but everything I put in the beds is extremely resilient and seems to be surviving.

The real problem is that my beds are too dry.  The wood hasn't rotted down enough yet to act as a sponge, and the loosely shoveled clay has a lot of air pockets that let water drain right through.  Granted, I located the mounds in an area where the groundwater is so high nothing will grow there, so this "problem" isn't so bad --- it made a nice spot to put in rosemary without ending up with root rot the way my rosemary plants usually do.

Problem number two is also related to my haphazard construction.  I left bits of branches sticking out around the edges, which made Mark very leery of mowing up to the sides of the mounds.  Add to that the fact that my mulch mostly blew away over the winter and I forgot to refresh it or weed the mounds, and the result is a weed thicket.  Surprisingly, the thickly seeded wildflowers seem to be holding their ground against the weeds, and the honeybees consider this area their second home, so all is not lost.

Now that I know more about the technique, though, I want to try hugelkultur again as another winter project.  This time, I'll bury the wood deeper and plant a cover crop to add fertility for the first year or so before planting anything important.  I'll be curious to see how quickly the rotting wood starts benefiting my plants.

If 2009 was the year without a summer then 2010's heat has made up for every drippy, rainy day.  Luckily, with our irrigation system humming along happily, garden plants are thrilled by the heat and sunlight.

Look at this --- baby butternut squashes!  Little watermelons hiding under the leaves!  Plump tomatoes just waiting to turn color!  And could that really be a canteloupe, the first one we've ever successfully grown on our farm?

Treat your flock to a homemade chicken waterer.

Although it seems hard to believe at the end of two weeks with highs in the 90s, now is the time to start your fall garden.  Luckily, your spring garden should be pretty much kaput --- all we have left is a stray broccoli plant or two, and some bedraggled potatoes fading back into the soil.  You can fill the gaps your spring garden left behind with most of the same crops, just switching around locations to ensure each plant family is in a new spot.

This coming week, we'll be direct seeding broccoli, beets, parsnips, and carrots (along with some late beans and corn).  In a few more weeks, we'll throw in peas, turnips, lettuce, and spinach.  Then come greens (and more lettuce) in August and garlic (and yet more lettuce) in September.

If you want to put in a fall garden, but this teaser just leaves you confused, check out last year's lunchtime series about the fall garden.  On the other hand, if you have garden areas that need some help and don't have time to tend fall vegetables, why not plant some buckwheat as a cover crop?

Our hardy kiwi plants sulked for the first two years, but as we begin their third summer, they're suddenly acting like vines.  Each plant has put up multiple stems, the longest of which has twined for five feet along its trellis wire.  At this stage, I want the kiwis to focus their energy on one main trunk, so I clipped off the extra shoots springing up from each rootstock.  Time to propagate!

Hardy kiwis are best grown from softwood cuttings, which means cuttings taken from new growth during the summer.  (In contrast, grapes are best grown from hardwood cuttings, which are the dormant, woody stems pruned out in the winter.)  I clipped the excess kiwi stems into six inch lengths, cut off the growing tips, and then clipped each leaf in half.  Although people who want 100% success often root softwood cuttings under misters using rooting hormone and applying bottom heat, I prefer a simpler method with a lower success rate --- put an inch of water in a jar, drop in the cuttings, and ignore for three weeks.

And now, look --- little roots all over the ends of the cuttings!  Once the roots expand enough to feed the cuttings, I'll put my new kiwis in the ground in a permanent location.  My original kiwis arrived in late July two years ago, so I assume the nursery used the exact same tricks I did, and that these new cuttings will really take off in the summer of 2012.

Getting started with perennials is always pricey --- our three hardy kiwis came to nearly fifty bucks.  But if you're in it for the long haul, you can turn that initial investment into a large orchard.  I'll bet at this time next year, I'll be giving baby kiwi plants away to everyone who can fit one in their garden.

After much trial and error I've concluded that the water we pump from the creek is too rich in particles for these little screen filters to handle.

Anna started experimenting with deleting the filters back in the spring. So far the results suggest we don't need them for this application. I suspect the high pressure is enough to push any stray particles out through the sprinkler nozzle.

After the internet, what I missed most during our power outage was the ability to pack food away for the winter.  With the freezer closed and halfway full, 30 hours without power wasn't a big deal, but there was no way I could introduce warm food without negatively impacting the old.  So I watched the summer squash achieve, then surpass, their optimal size, and as soon as the power came back on I was ready to freeze.

Roasted squash, cabbage for winter potstickers, and a few meals worth of green beans left the garden for cold storage.  I also dug into our fresh garlic to make nine cups of pesto for quick winter lunches.  While I was at it, I picked the second to last meal of broccoli --- these plants are buggy and ugly since they took so long to grow, but they still tasted great in cheese sauce for supper. 

While poking around, I discovered that we are overflowing with cucumbers for the first time ever.  Our farm is hard on cucurbits, and cucumbers are the worst, coming down with some kind of wilt disease every year just as they start to bear.  This year, I sprang for a wilt-resistant hybrid --- Diamant --- that is vigorous enough to (mostly) withstand our annual bane.  Since we don't like pickles, I'm suddenly serving fresh cucumbers with every lunch and dinner (and am seriously considering making the prolific vegetables part of a complete breakfast.)

Last year, the weather was against us and we only managed to pack away 13 gallons of food for the winter.  As a result, we bought grocery store produce for a couple of months this spring, and I vowed to do better.  With 6 gallons of vegetables, 7 cups of pesto, and 7 whole chickens already in the freezer before the end of June, we're starting to ponder what we'll do with the excess.

Potato onions were one of our experimental vegetables this year, and I'd be hard-pressed to call them a success.  The total production from one garden bed was 60 bulbs, but most were too small to bother skinning for supper.  I figure that all together they'd add up to enough onion flesh to feed us for about two weeks.

On the other hand, potato onions do have a lot of potential.  These storage onions can be grown from multiplied bulbs, a bit like Egyptian onions, with no need to buy seed or sets every year.  If we tweak our growing technique a bit, I think we could turn potato onions into a dependable part of our annual harvest.

We began our experiment with an eight ounce starter package of Loretta Yellow Multiplier Onions from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.  The company told us that we could choose to plant bulbs in the fall for a larger yield, but also a higher likelihood of losing onions to freezing, or could wait and plant in the spring.  We opted to toss them all in the ground at the beginning of November.

I'd like to say that we lost a third of the bulbs to winter cold, but instead I have to admit to mismanagement.  After planting, I mulched the bed heavily with autumn leaves since I knew from experience that garlic will push up through a heavy mulch with no problem.  Potato onions are made of weaker stuff, though, and the bulbs under the thickest mulch languished and died.

Spring came, and our remaining onions were doing well.  As the original bulb divided into multiple bulbs, the plant pushed the dirt aside and I was able to watch the onions grow.  I was pleased to see each individual plant turn into six to ten smaller plants, and then the bulbs began to swell.

I thought we were in for a bumper crop, but then over half of the potato onions threw up flower stalks.  An exhaustive search of the internet turns up little data about potato onion flowers, except that they're rare and channel energy away from the bulbs.  A few anecdotes suggest that potato onions are more likely to bloom when fall planted, so next year I'll stick to spring planting.  I was disappointed but not surprised to find that the blooming plants produced only small bulbs.

The few non-blooming onions, though, sparked my interest.  Each plant produced one to two big bulbs about two thirds the size of a storebought onion, along with several small bulbs for replanting.  I plan to eat the big bulbs and put all of the small ones in the ground early next spring.  If we can tweak our planting method to prevent blooming, I foresee doing away with fiddly seed onions and expensive and ephemeral onion sets and instead planting potato onions every year from our own offset bulbs.

I'm sure you've all been perched on the edge of your seats for the last couple of weeks wondering: Will cardboard mulch retard water penetration and harm our plants?  A couple of days after I posted about our cardboard mulch, Mark had the great idea of poking a bunch of holes in the cardboard with a pitchfork.  Even so, I was a bit concerned that the perforated cardboard would keep the soil too dry.

Rather than waiting to see if our vegetables started struggling, we bought a $10 moisture meter from Lowes and took some measurements.  As you can see, the perforated cardboard actually kept the soil wetter than either whole cardboard or bare soil, especially in the top inch of the soil.  Whole cardboard, on the other hand, was a loser --- I headed out with the pitchfork to perforate the overlooked bed right after taking these measurements.

Some days, I wish I had about ten acres of research farm and three or four interns to turn my little play experiments into real experiments.  I'm well aware that three data points for each treatment isn't enough information to draw any scientific conclusions.  But the numbers were remarkably uniform, suggesting that perforated cardboard mulch is definitely a plus when it comes to water retention.

Mark dug the rest of the garlic on Monday and hung it under the eaves to dry.  I can honestly tell you that there's more garlic beside our front door than I've ever seen in one spot in my life!

Learning from last year's drying fiasco, we hung up the garlic in small clumps immediately after digging.  This photo shows some of last week's garlic --- notice how it's already drying up nicely due to the air movement around the exposed bulbs and leaves.  If we had room indoors, we could also have spread the plants out in a single layer on screens to dry.

Either way, the bulbs will be thoroughly cured and ready to move to storage two weeks after harvest.  At that point, the garlic will have sucked all of the nutrients out of the leaves and roots, so it's safe to cut off the excess plant material.  We store our garlic in mesh bags we save from buying winter oranges.

Last year's garlic is still lingering on our kitchen shelf, proving that it is quite possible to eat your own garlic for an entire year without any special storage area.  The trick for preventing your garlic from sprouting is counter-intuitive --- keep it warm.  Once garlic has been cooled and then re-warmed, the plant thinks it has survived a winter and starts to grow.  Keep the heads warm (but not hot) and they'll linger in an eternal summer.

One last note on garlic curing and storing --- be sure to pull out the biggest heads for next year's planting.  I'm pretty sure that the few small heads mixed in with our many large heads were due to me not being vigilant enough about planting only the biggest cloves from the biggest heads last fall.  Even though you might want to brag by giving away those beautiful big heads to your friends and family, just think how much more you'll get to brag next year when every one of your garlic heads is that size!

This is what's called a 6 person bed weeder.

I like the idea of always having a shade cover that follows you around and it seems like it has to be easier on the back than the old standard method.

Afternoon siestas must be mandatory when you have such a shady place to lay down at after lunch?

Two weeks ago, I pinched off the tops of the black raspberry canes.  Left to their own devices, black raspberry primocanes will grow so long they bend down and root a new plant at their tip.  This trait is useful if you're looking to expand your berry patch, but is less useful if you actually want to be able to get into the patch to pick berries.

If you choose to keep your plants contained, you can pinch off the tips when the brambles reach waist high.  In most plants, apical dominance tells the plant to put all of its energy into growing the main shoot, but if that main shoot is gone, the side buds are allowed to grow.  The bottom photo shows what one plant looks like two weeks after pinching.  Notice how the side shoots have grown out --- these will all be coated with fruits next year when the primocane becomes a floricane.

I've similarly pruned our cultivated blackberries.  Blackberries usually aren't tip-rooters, but mine are, and I've also found that they will grow primocanes a dozen feet long if left to their own devices.  I prefer the plants to stay contained in my obsessive rows, so I take a few minutes to summer prune.

This week's lunchtime series has barely scratched the surface of learning to start a small garden and eat the fruits of your labor.  If you catch the bug, you're sure to want to learn more.  Of course, you'll keep reading our blog, but where else should you turn?

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle may help to get you inspired, and also includes some in-season recipes.  For more solid information about growing your food, many beginners report getting a lot out of Square Foot Gardening, despite its flaws.  The basic spacing, planting, and harvesting information about all vegetables can be found on extension service websites using a quick google search.  (I've found keyword combinations like "tomato cultivation" get good results.)

Year one is a good time to start learning about the soil food web, and Teaming With Microbes is a quick, fun way to open your eyes to what's going on beneath the surface.  I don't have specific books to recommend, but other important topics to consider include composting and beneficial insects.

Finally, why not take a master gardener class?  Most state extension services now offer these semester-long classes for a small fee.  You'll meet other gardeners in your area and will come away with a great grounding in basic concepts.

Whatever you do, don't put the process off until next year.  If all you have the time and energy for is throwing one tomato plant in the ground, do it!  Right this instant!  Turn off your computer, pick up your trowel, and plant!

The squash vine borer will be hitting our farm shortly --- I know because the first brilliant flowers have come out on the summer squash.  With the impending collapse of our plants looming, I've resolved to find a better solution than Bt.  Bacillus thuringiensis is rated organic but is still a relatively broad spectrum insecticide, which means it may be doing more harm than good by killing beneficials that would otherwise wipe out the borer.  In addition, try as we might to spray once a week and after rains, Bt doesn't seem to be preventing the total destruction of our summer squash crop each year.  We're both willing to do without summer squash for a year or two, if need be, while we figure out a better option.

This year, we're keeping our experiments simple.  I'm planting a new bed of summer squash every two weeks to give me an idea of the timing of the infestation.  In the north, you can just plant your summer squashes late, after the fourth of July, and the vine borer will have finished its flying stage.  In the south, though, the vine borer has multiple generations, so I'm not sure how early I can plant squash and still miss the insect's depradations.  A planting at the beginning of August 2009 netted us a bounty of summer squash...for about two weeks before the frost hit.  I'm hoping to be able to plant a bit earlier than that and still miss the borer.

Other options to try in later years if the easy route fails include:

• Planting a more resistant summer squash variety such as Summer Crookneck
  
• Using a floating row cover over the plants to physically exclude attack
• Wrapping something around the stem (panty hose and aluminum foil have both been used) to keep the larvae out
  
• Mounding up dirt over the stem at intervals to promote rooting (which would require a different squash variety since we've been planting bush squash)
  

If you ask ten gardeners the best way to manage tomatoes, you'll get twenty answers.  We've tried out a different method every year, and still haven't found one we're truly happy with.  This year we're using out the old standby --- one stake per plant, then prune to three main stems.

The Master Gardeners of Santa Clara County have a very comprehensive page about the advantages and disadvantages of different tomato support methods.  They note that the one stake method results in less productive plants, which is the reason I've steered clear of pruning in the past.

On the other hand, the tomato blight is still in the air this year across the eastern U.S., and I'm willing to accept a lower yield if I actually get something.  Pruning does have the advantage of keeping the plant drier, which means that fungi don't have the humid environment they need to thrive.  Here's hoping that drastic pruning and other blight prevention will give us a crop.

The easiest way to lose the gardening bug permanently is to start a huge garden with a bunch of vegetable varieties suited only to an expert, then see everything disappear down insect gullets in a few months.  I recommend that beginning gardeners instead start small, with just a few vegetables that are nearly impossible to kill.  Here are my top contenders:

Leaf lettuce - The time has already passed for this cool season crop, but fall will be here before you know it.  Lettuce is great for beginners because you can't do anything wrong and you get to harvest a month after planting.  One of the easiest to grow in our area is Black-seeded Simpson, but I like to mix in a red variety for eye candy.  Read all of my tips on growing lettuce here.

Swiss chard - Most greens are extremely easy, but Swiss chard takes the cake.  Unlike other greens, swiss chard doesn't get bitter, nor does it bolt the first year.  The greens are mild in flavor and can be substituted in recipes which call for spinach (a vegetable that does bolt quite quickly.)  Although they taste the same as the white-stalked variety, urban gardeners will love Swiss chard varieties with leaf stalks ranging in color from white to yellow to red since they're pretty enough to mix into your flower border.  This warm season crop should be planted after your frost-free date --- for nearly all of you, that means you can go ahead and plant now.  Once the leaves are four inches tall, I start cutting them just like leaf lettuce once or twice a week, making sure I don't cut the growing bud, but taking most other leaves.

Tomatoes - In my opinion, tomatoes are really a year two crop, but the flavor difference between a homegrown tomato and a storebought one is so great that few people can resist planting them.  For the raw beginner, you should go ahead and buy a transplant or two from the feed store and put them out after the frost-free date.  Choose a slicer or a tommy-toe (or both).  Be sure to cage or stake your tomato, and if you're starting this year, I highly recommend pruning since the blight is still in the air.  In later years, I think you'll be happier starting your own tomatoes from seed and growing primarily romas for ease of storage, but in year one you should stick to simple vegetables that go straight on your plate.

Basil - I see people buy basil transplants, and I can't figure out why.  Basil is the easiest herb you can grow --- throw the seeds on the ground around your frost-free date and you'll be picking off leaves a couple of weeks later.  The trick to a summer-long harvest is to cut your basil back regularly (at least once a week) and never let it bloom.  With lettuce and swiss chard, I told you to be careful not to harvest the central growing bud, but with basil I advocate the reverse.  Cut the whole top off the plant, leaving one or two pairs of older leaves at the base, and it will branch out into a bush.  Keep cutting the youngest, tastiest leaves, and your plant will just get bigger and bushier.  When the basil does start trying to bloom, pick off the flower buds.  I recommend a simple Sweet Italian or Genovese basil for your first year, but later you can branch out into the varieties that taste great in other ethnic foods.

Sweet Corn - The only major thing that can go wrong with corn is lack of pollination if you plant too small of an area.  I try to plant at least two short rows together, and three or four are better.  Your corn will mature nearly all at once, so for a full summer harvest, I plant a bed on our frost-free date, and continue planting another bed every two weeks until the end of June.  Like tomatoes, there's no comparison between homegrown and storebought sweet corn.  But this is the one vegetable where I like to stick with fancy hybrids --- heirloom varieties are starchy instead of sweet.

Okra - Okra may seem like an odd choice for the beginner, but in the South few crops beat its ease of growth.  In fact, the plant has such huge, beautiful flowers that okra can easily pass for an ornamental.  Plant the seeds at the frost-free date, and in a couple of months you'll see blooms and little, furry fruits.  Cut the whole fruit off at the stem when it is less than three inches long and steam it --- the trick to defeating okra slime is to never let water touch the interior of the fruit.  We eat our steamed okra with our fingers, holding it by the stem and eating the fruit portion off, but you could cut the tops off after steaming them if you like.  The traditional method of eating okra is to slice, batter, and fry it, but I can't really recommend that approach.  Our favorite variety is Clemson Spineless.

The beginner should pick two to four of these varieties to try out their first year, steering clear of okra if you live in the north and of tomatoes if you live in a very hot area like Texas.  Plant a very small garden, no more than perhaps 100 feet square, and mulch the whole thing if possible to cut down on weeding.  If you have anther choice, steer clear of pots, which are harder than they look, and keep good records of when and where you planted and what happened.  Most of you still have time to start something this year, so go do it!

Several friends of mine have neither the inclination, time, nor space to grow their own vegetables, so they join a CSA to be part of the local food system.  Inevitably, a few weeks in, they regret the decision.  "What do I do with a huge basket of mixed greens?" they moan.  Or, "Five butternut squash?  I don't know how to cook squash!"

The truth is that the beginning gardener often feels the same way.  We're used to buying whatever vegetables suit our fancy or are mandated by our favorite recipes, and we don't know how to make a salad when we realize that lettuce and tomatoes are never in season at the same time.  On a similar note, we might want to start a garden, but we don't know which vegetables are within our reach and which ones are the domain of experienced green thumbs.  How can we even start when the whole endeavor looks so daunting?  It's much easier to pick up some organic produce at the grocery store and figure we're doing our part to save the world.

Although I know that many of our readers are long time gardeners and cooks who use in-season produce without thinking about it, I also suspect that others of you are afraid to put the first plants in the ground because you just don't know how to go from seed to gourmet feast.  This week's lunchtime series launches a new facet of this blog geared toward giving beginners the information they need to start a quick and easy garden and then to enjoy the bounty.  I hope that you experienced gardeners and foodies will read along and add your own advice on which plants are easy to grow in your neck of the woods, and on simple recipes you use to produce delicious, in-season meals.

Did we really need the extra Trake?

Yes...the Trake is one of those garden instruments that when backed up with a twin can become twice the tool if you've got the extra hands to wield them.

Let's look at a contest between the six beds of shelling peas I planted in early March and the six beds of broccoli I transplanted in early April.  This week, I've harvested about a quarter of the shelling peas, and about two thirds of the broccoli, freezing all of the peas and most of the broccoli.  Elapsed harvest and freezing time?  Half an hour for the peas, an hour and a half for the broccoli.

So far the two crops seem to be about even, right?  Now let's look at how much food we've gotten out of those beds --- one cup for the peas, two gallons for the broccoli.  When you look at the food produced per hour harvest time, that's like the difference between being paid $2.50 per hour and $50 per hour* --- I know which one I'd choose.

Granted, peas do have a lot going for them in other ways.  They provide protein for our bodies, and also fix nitrogen to feed the soil.  They freeze well (but so does the broccoli) and are finished in time for me to plant a summer crop (though broccoli wins here, coming out a precious week or two earlier.)  We find them tasty and easy to cook with, too, but no more so than broccoli.

This is the fourth year we've grown shelling peas, and each year I was certain the problem was the pea variety.  Having run through four different varieties now, I'm ready to accept that maybe shelling peas aren't the best crop for our farm.  Our snow and sugar snap peas seem to produce about four times as much plant matter per bed, but we can't really grow more of them since we only like them fresh.  Maybe we'll skip the shelling peas next year and double up on broccoli instead?

In fact, we could have tripled our broccoli planting since I still have five empty beds that are waiting to be filled with the other half of our sweet potato slips, slowly budding in the sun room.  Why maintain empty beds all spring when they could be feeding us broccoli?

*I'm not suggesting we actually get $50 worth of food per hour with the broccoli.  I didn't count in the planting, transplanting, weeding, and watering time, and I actually have no clue how much frozen broccoli costs in the store.

Hopefully you're sold by now and can think of at least one use for comfrey on your homestead.  So how do you grow it?

Choose a good location.  Comfrey isn't picky about soil quality, but it requires deep soil with no hardpan, rock layer, or high water table to prevent the roots from reaching deep.  Heavy clay is no problem, and is in fact preferred.  Although comfrey is moderately shade tolerant, it will be less productive when planted out of the sun.

Propagate your plants.  Comfrey is only grown from cuttings, so unless your pockets are deep you will want to buy a few plants and then divide them up.  The good news is that one good-sized comfrey plant can be divided into dozens of small plants, many of which can be harvested starting the first year.  First dig up the large plant and cut off sections near the top containing leaves --- each leaf crown area can become its own plant.  Then take all of the small roots that are left, cut them into one inch sections, and plant them in a nursery bed one inch deep and two inches apart.  These youngsters can be transplanted into permanent locations the next spring.

Prepare your ground.  Comfrey will outcompete almost anything once it gets a foothold, but you could lose your crop to weeds while it's getting established.  So take a bit of time to root out any perennial weeds.

Plant your comfrey.  Comfrey needs a permanent location, much like an orchard, since it's very difficult to eradicate once comfrey has gained a foothold on a plot of ground.  Space plants three feet apart in good soil, or half that in poor soil.  Plant in the fall (September to November) or spring (March to May.)

Weed and fertilize.  One tantilizing system consists of planting comfrey in the chicken run.  Since chickens don't like unwilted comfrey leaves, the birds will weed between the comfrey and fertilize it in the process, only requiring you to add wood ashes or another form of potassium every few years to balance the fertility.  You can cut a plant or two every day while feeding your chickens, and the poultry will eat up the cuttings the next day once they're wilted.  If you're not using chickens, dig out any perennial weeds by hand and fertilize annually.

Harvest.  You can begin cutting leaves as early as the first year, but the plants produce the maximum yield starting in the third year.  After several more years, productivity will begin to decline as the centers of the huge comfrey plants die out.  This is the point at which you'll want to dig up the plants and divide them, or just turn in pigs to root out the comfrey and start a new comfrey patch elsewhere.

Weeding may be a boring job, but it has its perks.  While ripping up big weeds in the upper raspberry patch, Mark came across this tiny box turtle.  Ten minutes later, he found another!  I guess our berry patch has the box turtle seal of approval.

I have to admit that I'm a bad, bad farmer.  A good farmer would move the box turtles out of the area since they like to eat strawberries and tomatoes.  Instead, I carefully relocated the pair to the shade under the worm bin and gave them a strawberry apiece.  What can I say --- finding a hatchling box turtle has been my life-long dream.

Our homemade chicken waterer is a quick and easy DIY project.

Hills boldly states that no other plant will produce as much biomass for composting when grow in an out of the way corner as comfrey.  In addition, comfrey is a much-lauded dynamic accumulator, able to stretch its roots deep into the subsoil and draw up calcium, potassium, phosphorus, and trace minerals that are out of reach of most other plants.  Finally, comfrey's C:N ratio is so low that it nearly melts into the soil, creating compost in next to no time.  What's not to like?

When growing comfrey as the raw material for compost, Hills recommends taking six to eight cuttings between April and November.  If you're using a highly productive Russian Comfrey variety, you can produce 100 or more tons of leaves per acre in this manner, and you could potentially double or triple that yield in heavily fertilized patches on a small scale.  The plants are cut two inches above the ground when they are between one and three feet tall, allowed to dry for 48 hours to lower their moisture content, then gathered and added to the compost pile.

An alternative use of comfrey as a fertility plant is found in forest gardening literature, which suggests planting comfrey below fruit trees as a sort of living mulch.  Last year, I tried this out, planting comfrey around the base of our nectarine, and now I'm cutting the comfrey every week or two, allowing the leaves to drop down and produce a heavy mulch and then compost around the tree's trunk.

On the positive side, I've noticed that the under-tree area requires nearly no weeding, but I feel like the comfrey may be competing with the tree more than it's giving back with my frequent cuttings --- the nectarine's leaves aren't as vibrantly green as the leaves of our two peach trees.  Unfortunately, I have no other nectarines to compare mine to, so the data is very inconclusive.  However, Hills agrees with my gut reaction, noting that comfrey will steal potassium from fruit trees and requires more nitrogen than the tree can handle well.  I'm going to keep searching for some other literature to the contrary, but for now I'm thinking I would probably be better off planting comfrey beyond the tree's spread and cutting the leaves to drop around my tree's base.

When we first started this irrigation project the budget was a bit limited.

I'm sure it breaks every law of proper electric wiring, but sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do.
                                                                                                                                            

It's basically four 100 foot extension cords cobbled together and wired so each pole is carrying 110 volts. I'm pretty sure this is close to the maximum distance you should think about stretching these cords. Electrical tape works well for sealing up the junctions where each cord is plugged into.

We're going on the third year of this setup. There was a problem in the beginning with the pump connections, but I solved that by figuring out how to make the contact points waterproof.

If you feel like you're testing the limits of safety try picking up the cord in question to see if it's giving off much heat while you have your pump working. It's this heat that can be dangerous and must be dealt with by making the distance shorter or the electrical cord thicker.

Internet sources tell me to harvest new potatoes when:

1. The potatoes begin to bloom.
2. The calendar changes to June.
3. The peas are ripe.

I noticed the first flowers on our potato plants this weekend, so I decided to dig around and see what's there.  The result?  The potatoes are past the tiny new potato stage I love, and are already swelling into the half-fist-size zone.  I guess option 3 is the best indicator for my garden since the peas have been ripe for a week or two, which is just about when I should have harvested new potatoes.

Most people harvest new potatoes by grubbing them out from around the bases of plants, leaving some tubers in place to finish growing.  I opted to just yank out two plants since they were encroaching on my biggest tomato's growing zone.  This gave me a great opportunity to explore the benefits of my modified Ruth Stout method, and I'm totally sold on the heavy mulch.  The potatoes required just a little digging with the trake, but they came out clean and beautiful, with nary a spot of green.  The area is also nearly weed-free despite never being weeded (though I did toss a few more handfuls of grass clippings on insipient weeds a few weeks ago.)

I picked a bowlful of our stunning sugar snap and snow peas, cut up the first basil leaves of the year, and added the rest of the ingredients for a modified Green Bean and Potato Salad.  The taste of summer!