More on GM Seeds

Last week the idea of genetically modified seeds popped up due to a seed giveaway I was hosting. I mentioned that it would be a good topic for further discussion and recently Susy at Chiot's Run put together a great post explaining everything that you need to know about GM seeds. It's frustrating to realize that a large seed conglomerate can dominate so much of the agricultural market but there are options for the home gardener. Certain heirloom seed companies are competing against the big corporation Susy mentions and offer quality open pollinated heirloom seeds that you can save each year. I'll let you read her post to find out more, and I highly recommend that you do!

How to Extract Seeds from Ornamental Peppers

So what can you do while it's under 20 degrees outside and you are stuck inside but still want to do something garden related? Extract seeds from ornamental peppers! That probably wasn't the first thing on your mind but it works for me! Extracting the seeds from these 'Black Pearl' ornamental peppers was one of those small items on my to-do list that I kept intending to do but just never got around to do it. (I moved my Black Pearl pepper plant indoors in a pot to overwinter for next year so I wasn't in a big hurry*.)

The other day I was looking in a catalog and saw the seeds for Black Pearl going for around $5 per pack. It didn't tell me how many seeds were in each pack but in other catalogs I've seen the seeds with at most 10 in each package. The seeds should come true but since I haven't raised it from seed before I can't claim to have verified that with my own eyes.

Extracting the seeds is easy but take caution because these peppers can be hot! In the past I've burned the skin on my fingers while trying to chop fresh cayenne peppers - I had no wish to replicate that experience! To extract the seeds I used a paring knife and a fork. I held the ripe red pepper** down with the fork and cut each pepper in half. Then I used the tip of the paring knife to scrape out the pepper seeds onto a plate. Easy and fast! the inside of each little cherry sized pepper is almost all seed.

Then I let them dry overnight. You can see how saving a few seeds can really aid your gardening budget. I didn't count the seeds but there could be from 75-100 that came from 7 Black Pearl peppers. Now if you divide that up into the package above then pay what the catalogs ask you come up with a $35-$50 price tag! (10 seeds per pack at $5 a pack) Saving seed is well worth the time to keep your favorite plants from year to year.

Did you save seed this fall?

* Peppers are perennials but are not cold hardy and may be overwintered indoors in pots like houseplants.
**Black Pearl Ornamental Peppers turn from an extremely dark purple to a red color when ripe.

The First Snowfall of 2011

Technically my title is completely incorrect!  We did have snow in January and February but this is the first snowfall of the coming winter season.  And technically this isn't even officially winter yet.  I'm just breaking all the rules for this post! I'm going wild!

Anyway...yesterday we had a light snowfall.  It was the kind of snow that was so wet that when contact was made with the ground it quickly melted into regular old H₂0.  What snow coverage we had on the grassy areas didn't last long as the air temps were too warm to maintain the frozen precipitation.  Despite its brevity the snow was pretty!

Snow on pot of pak choy.

Snow on deck.

Snow on chives and blue fescue pot.

Snow on pyracantha branch. Almost looks like ice.

The backyard with snow.

The Blue Garden Shed with snow!

Grassy area shielded from snow by a butterfly bush.

I suspect we'll have more snow this year than in previous years.  I've heard our winter I supposed to be wetter!  Good thing I bought sleds!

Have you had your first snowfall yet?

Red Clover Cover Crop and Green Manure

After the summer garden is gone there is still work to be done. My daughters and I went out last week to take care of some last minute raised bed winterizing. We are doing one important step now: adding organic matter. Why?  Because organic matter matters! By improving the soil you enrich it with the nutrients the plants need to be happy.  We are using a readily available supply of newspapers like we did to add material to the compost bin. We shredded them down and mixed them into the beds. They will break down over time and will help the beds maintain their moisture.

After we added the shredded newspaper we leveled the soil and sprinkled red clover seed (Trifolium pratense) over the garden. Clover is an excellent cover crop for the garden since its roots have a nitrogen fixing property that will help to add nitrogen back into the soil.  When the clover flowers we'll turn it back into the soil to use as an organic green manure then cover the beds with plastic to let them cook for the last couple of weeks before spring planting.  By covering the raised beds with plastic we should be able to kill off all the clover plants and prevent the clover from becoming a weed in the raised bed garden.  We should be able to replenish any used nitrogen in the garden and enhance our garden for next year without artificial fertilizers.  Feed the soil and you feed the plants! (More importantly:  feed the soil-feed the plants-feed the gardener!)

One thing to note: legumes may not be advisable to plant after a clover cover crop as clover is a legume and is susceptible to the same diseases. Clovers and vetches (legumes) as well as wheat, rye, and oats (grasses) are some good suggestions for winter cover crops in Tennessee. (And probably many other areas too!)

To see what others are doing in their vegetable gardens go visit Tina at In the Garden for her November Veggie Garden Update!

November in the Vegetable Garden

As strange as it may sound there are things still growing in the vegetable garden in November and it's not because of our unusually warm weather. Unfortunately there is only one vegetable growing but there are several kinds of herbs that are doing great. All the vegetable garden pictures were taken this morning while a light frost was still covering everything.

The one vegetable that continues to grow through the cold weather is the lettuce. It's a Romain mix that I put out several weeks ago that while it's growth is slow is still growing. Lettuce can handle light frosts and has already been through 4-5. Just add a little coldframe over it and who knows how long it will keep growing! Of course Tennessee has a mild winter so if you live north of me your lettuce might not last as long.

I planted some oregano seeds while my squash was growing in the hopes that it would ward off my number number one most despised garden pest: squash vine borers. Oregano is listed in many charts as a generic works against nearly everything companion planting herb. It didn't work. I may have to try a second organic strategy and place row covers over the squash when the borers are actively reproducing. The thing about organic pest control practices is that they are not fool proof; what works for one gardener may not work for the gardener next door. The result of my companion planting of oregano with the squash ended up with quite a bit of oregano. Two raised beds are completely covered with it and will need thinned in the spring.

Another raised bed is completely covered with cilantro. I read once on a blog (sadly I can't remember where otherwise I would link to it) where cilantro was by volume the most expensive grocery vegetable. If that's the case then I'm doing very well! This cilantro was sprinkled over the garden after my first plants of the year bolted.

Another herb that has a small place in our garden is parsley. I bought this one from a garden club member who sells to farmers markets and festivals. I stuck it in a little corner of the cilantro bed. I didn't plan on the vegetable garden become an herb garden but the two gardens do go hand in hand!

Of course we do have the strawberry plants that are growing way outside the boundary of their original raised bed. When I get the greenhouse enclosed I'll transplant them to a new spot where hopeful they can be very fruitful! I may have to bring many of them to a plant swap in the spring.

That's about all there is to my vegetable garden update for November. I was disappointed that the spinach never germinated. It was probably old seed and I'll have to buy some more this year. Soon I'll evaluate my raised bed layout/design and figure out where to plant things next year. I try to rotate my crops as much as possible each year to prevent the same diseases from bothering the same plants in subsequent years. Go check out Tina's blog to see what other folks have in their vegetable garden!

From my window...

From my window I can see my homemade compost bin, unfinished as it is, with our poor ole jack-o-lantern resting its big orange head on the grass clippings from my last mowing. That relic of a Halloween come and gone will come around again next year in some way. Either as broken down black gold or in the seeds that he left behind. His progeny will most likely grace us next season with lots of little orange gourds ready to be carved and given personalities of their own! Soon I'll add some leaves to the top of the bin and won't be able to see our old friend Jack, but he'll be there. In fact he might even be in my tomatoes next year, who knows?

Smooshing Pumpkins

We've all heard about the infamous teenagers who go around neighborhoods looking for pumpkins to smash. Smashing pumpkins is one of those activities I never did and frankly always found rude and obnoxious, unless of course the smashers purchased their own pumpkins but that's rarely the case. In fact I find the current state of my own pumpkins to be quite rude too but I can't blame any misguided teenagers for this. Nope, I blame the borers (insert scary generic sound effect here).

The vine borers have been relentless this year in the garden. The borers made holes the trunks of the vines and tunneled their way into every part of the pumpkin that they thought tasted good. I suppose if I had been more on top of things I could have cut them out of the vines. I also suppose if I were more on top of things these pumpkins would be in the compost bin by now! I've just been too busy lately to take care of little chores and these smooshing pumpkins have been left to disintegrated. I'll move them before Saturday, but maybe they add a little Halloween ambiance?

I had to resort to buying our Jack-O-Lantern pumpkin from the store this year. Last year's pumpkin came from a pumpkin farm that we took the kids to, but we haven't had time for that this year. I'm sure Jack 2009 will be appearing on this blog soon. Until then these rapidly deteriorating pumpkins from the vegetable garden will have to do!

Raised Bed Vegetable Garden with Stone Borders

It's taken me all summer to get to it but I'm finally taking the first steps toward changing the vegetable garden to the parterre layout. I had some of the blocks sitting around for months now and others I borrowed from our patio sidewalk expansion which I just haven't had time to get to this summer.  Using the stone for the border is more expensive than wood but will last much longer.  

For a comparison take the $2.50 cost per foot of these stone blocks and compare it with a piece of lumber somewhere around $5-6 for a 10 foot piece.  That comes to about $0.50-$0.60 per foot which makes the stone about 5 times more expensive.  The big advantage is that it won't ever rot and it looks pretty good!

So far I only have one small portion of the raised bed vegetable garden put together.  Even it still needs several more blocks placed to complete the beds.   These beds are going to be planted ASAP with some more winter greens.  Pak choy sounds good and maybe more spinach.

Ever tried potatoes in the fall?  This one was a volunteer in a large nursery pot I was using for a weeding bucket.  I'm tempted to wrap the top area where you see the metal stakes in plastic to create a little greenhouse effect. I'm theorizing here but I might just be able to get some potatoes by December.  We'll see!  The neat thing about potatoes in a pot is that when they are ready all you need to do is dump the pot to get the potatoes.

How's your vegetable garden growing?

Vegetable of the Month: Pumpkins of course!

I officially nominate the pumpkin for vegetable of the month! Do I hear a second?

I realize that the selection of a pumpkin may be predictable but it's such a seasonally appropriate vegetable for October. After all could you have even think of fall harvests and Halloween without pumpkins? Whether they are turned into pies or Jack-o-lanterns these orange globes of October have become representatives of the fall season. Of course they aren't just in orange, some are even white!

They also come in a variety of sizes from small decorative ones to giant world record hopefuls! We've grown some more modest one's here in our garden but we're proud of all of our veggies. Perhaps next year we'll try for the big one.

One neat thing to do with pumpkins is to carve them. But I'm sure you already knew that! We haven't picked up our carving pumpkin yet but take a look at this one we saw on our visit to the Nashville Zoo.

For now these three orbs of orangeness that were grown in our own garden will grace our front steps as decoration for the fall. Very soon we'll go out looking for our Great Pumpkin!


After all what would Halloween be without it?

(Image from Wikipedia. Illustrated of course by the great Charles M. Shulz!)

Vegetable Family: Solanaceae (The Nightshades)

The other day I wrote about crop rotation, it's importance, and it's benefit in the garden so today I thought we'd begin looking at the individual families of vegetables and how they fit into the grand scheme of things. Since it is probably the most popular family, because of one of its members (the tomato), we'll start discussing the nightshade or solanaceae family.  Calling this family the nightshades makes them sound a little like some sort of super villain from the movies but no, we're talking fruit and vegetables here.

The Solonaceae (Nightshade) Family

The Solanaceae family has many of the most popular vegetables in home gardens.  Obviously there is the tomato which is probably the number one plant in the vegetable garden (remember it really is a fruit). There are also the peppers which are well loved by those who can take the heat and even those who can't! Potatoes are also in this family which are grown for the tubers and not the fruit like other family members. This family also includes the tomatillos and eggplants.  All of these plants are in the nightshade/solanaceae family and thus are susceptible to the same diseases.  They also have many of the same nutrients needs.

The Rodale's Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening (an affiliate link to a great book!) recommends preceding the solanaceae with a grain or grass crop and follow with legumes.  Legumes (like beans and peas) fix nitrogen back into the soil if they are allowed to decay and the remains are worked back into the soil.  Tomatoes are heavy feeders and will deplete the soil of the nutrients they use which makes the same location a poor on to replant the same crop in unless the soil is replenished with amendments.

Possible Diseases and Problems

There are no shortage of challenges with members of this family.  Diseases can frequently cross between these types of plants which makes rotating crops very important.  Many of these diseases can reside in the soil from season to season and the rotation of crops gives them time to diminish between plantings.

Here are some of the diseases and issues the nightshade family may have problems with:

• Verticillium wilt 
• Fusarium wilt
• Early Blight
• Late Blight
• Blossom End Rot
• Scab (on potatoes)
• Tobacco Mosaic Virus (Yep, tobacco is a relative. And no, smoking does not count as a vegetable serving)
• Nematodes (marigolds help deter them)
• Insects: aphids, spider mites, hornworms, flea beetles, cutworms

This list is not complete but mentions a few of the more common pest and disease issues affecting tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and other members of the solonaceae family.

Is the tomato the number one plant in your vegetable garden?

Cleaning Up the Vegetable Garden

I began the first part of cleaning up the vegetable garden and preparing it for winter today. The summer garden went much longer last year and we had tomatoes until the end of the October. Unfortunately that's not the case this year. The few tomatoes that were left on the vines were not worth waiting for them to ripen. Besides it's good to have an excuse for fried green tomatoes!

While my daughters and I were out in the garden I pulled the vines and they ran around with empty nursery pots trying to find good tomatoes to gather. I'm afraid the pickings were slim. I managed to clean out the large 4'x8' bed (not the fall vegetable bed), a 4'x6' bed and a 2'x4' bed, all of which housed tomatoes. I won't do tomatoes again in those beds as I try to rotate crops each year. The leftover vines were dumped in piles where they currently remain until I get around to dealing with them.

With the beds cleared out I have a few options: plant a cover crop, solarize the beds to kill off any diseases, or plant some more frost tolerant vegetables like kale, cabbage, or spinach. If I replant the beds I'd better do it soon as the time is moving fast but row covers should help extend the season. When I get the chance I'll plant some garlic in the small 2'x4' bed.

While cleaning up the garden we cleaned out a few of the vegetables. It was interesting to find carrots in the garden that I planted from seed in the spring. They were completely covered by the tomatoes and I just left them in the beds. They aren't the prettiest looking carrots you'll ever see but they do taste good!

We picked a small assortment of carrots, tomatoes (mostly green), radishes, and a couple cayenne peppers. I must have a hundred cayenne peppers ready to be picked still in the garden. I'll never use them all! I like to put a few in a homemade deer repellent that works fairly well (chopped cayenne pepper, garlic, dish soap, and water). I spray it onto my most prized plants and with one bite of it the deer learn to avoid the plant.

What have you harvested lately?

Copyright 2009 The Home Garden

October Tomatoes

We had another harvest of tomatoes this week! We've been loving the sheer volume of tomatoes this summer and are sadly lamenting the end of the harvest that will be coming soon. The weather is still warm enough for the tomatoes to produce and there will probably be another crop before the frosts but the end is near!



Most of this batch of tomatoes has now become sauce but a few were saved to become sandwich ornaments. Well maybe not ornaments since these tomatoes have flavor and aren't like your off-season store bought varieties that are picked green and shipped across the continent. Soon we will be going through the grieving process with a profound sense of loss for our favorite red fruits of the garden. Is it wrong to grieve the loss of fresh tomatoes? To quote a cliche "If it's wrong, I don't want to be right!"



We did find a few cayenne peppers ready to be picked amongst the tomato crop. The peppers are nearing their end as well. The poor peppers, their spotlight is dominated by the yummy red wonders of the garden world.

Other tomato posts:
The Best Way to Plant a Tomato
A Tomato Crop and a Tomatoholic
Enemies and Allies: Hornworms and Wasps

From the Vegetable Garden

It's time for another peek into the vegetable garden! The fall vegetables are picking up their pace while the summer ones are rapidly screeching to a halt among the rains that have been making Spring Hill, Tennessee seem much more like the Pacific Northwest. I saw the sun yesterday for about 15-20 minutes and used that time to scope out the garden and its current state of disrepair. I'll post more on the work that needs to be done another time as the list making is just beginning but for now have a look at the vegetable garden. Don't forget to check out other blogs for their vegetable garden updates at In the Garden!

By far the greenest of the greens are the radishes. I've never actually eaten radish greens before and recently have come across some radish green soup recipes that look interesting. I picked a nice sized radish this morning perfect for slicing and dropping in a salad.

A few beets are coming along. I'm a little disappointed that more have not emerged but I may have time to add some more seed if I plan on adding some frost protection later.

The beans are well on their way to producing a healthy final crop. Hopefully we'll get to freeze the green beans to preserve them over the winter. We don't have a pressure canner which is necessary to can beans and other low acid foods.

Some of the last of the summer crops still producing are the peppers. The peppers have had no problems this year with bugs, animals, or disease. These peppers are the same as the purple peppers from my last vegetable garden update but have been left to develop a little longer to change their color to red. I like a little variety in pepper appearance from the same old green peppers.

Of course we can't forget the herbs! My wife's favorite has to be cilantro and it is coming up everywhere in one 3'x4' raised bed. I let our spring crop of cilantro go to seed then sprinkled the seed in this bed and just let it go. Once the cooler temperatures and consistent rains came the cilantro started to sprout. There are 4-5 small seedling that have emerged with quite a few more cotyledons appearing every day. We may have more cilantro than we can handle.

I have one more vegetable to show you, the pumpkin. We actually have about 4 on the vine but their growth is going to be severely limited due to the squash vine borer. If there was one bug I could eliminate from my garden for all time it would have to be the squash vine borer. Every summer squash and zucchini crop this year was destroyed by the borers and now they moved on to the pumpkins. At least we'll end up with a few nice decorative pumpkins this year even if they aren't large enough to make the Jack-O-Lantern for Halloween. That will give us a good excuse to visit a pumpkin farm with the kids.

6 Steps to Prepare for the Winter Vegetable Garden

This year I'm determined to grow more out of my vegetable garden than the typical summer tomato!  In the past I've managed to sustain herbs like cilantro throughout the winter but haven't been determined enough to nurture many vegetables other than spinach throughout the cold months. (It's hard to get psyched up to run out in the cold for garden maintenance!) The spinach I've done in the past usually lasts fine on it's own for a while but my garden could produce much, much more.  I've even had lettuce make it through the winter to produce in the spring but it really wasn't harvestable during the winter months. If we could have fresh garden greens rather than the greens from the store we would not only be saving money but eating healthier too.

Here's what I need to do to get ready for my winter vegetable garden:

Radish Seedling

1. Finish cleaning out a few more garden beds. 
2. Prepare the soil by adding some additional compost and organic fertilizers.
3. Plant more seed for cool season vegetables.  Lettuce, spinach, and radishes are doing great at the moment.  Our current rain streak is giving me hope for a great crop! I may need to start some vegetables indoors and transplant to the garden.
4. Prepare a cold frame structure for my vegetable plants to live under. The shelter of a cold frame is the key to keeping my vegetables going through the winter.
5. Cover my cucumber/melon trellises that can double as garden greenhouses with plastic.  I won't do that until frosts are in the forecast.
6. Cover when the frosts are on their way!

Are you growing vegetables in your winter garden this year?

Spinach Seedling

Fall Seedlings

The fall vegetable garden is coming along! It never fails to fill me with excitement when those freshly planted seeds grow into seedlings. Especially when the seedlings were planted naturally through self-sowing as is the case with my cilantro. Cilantro is one of those expensive to buy but easy to grow plants.  It likes it when the weather is cooler and always germinates easily in the fall.  The trick to getting it to self-sow is to give it room to grow then let it go to seed! (Pretty easy right?)  Cilantro gets big when in bloom so it needs the space and so might the gardener!

The other little seedling to sprout this week was the 'Baby green Fortune' pak choi. It was very tasty and very heat tolerant back in the spring, now it's time to have some in the fall.  A couple plants lasted into late June.  The pak choi seedlings germinated in less than 5 days in a pot on my back porch. If you don't want a big fall garden consider planting in pots near the door to the house. The residual heat from the house will help the vegetables and it's pretty convenient too when the temperatures are colder than you would like them to be!

I have to clean up the vegetable garden more before I plant other fall crops but so far here's what is in the fall vegetable garden: Lettuce (a red Romaine called 'Rouge D'Hiver' and 'Tom Thumb'), Spinach 'Teton Hybrid', and Radishes 'German Giant'.

What seeds have you planted for your fall vegetable garden?

The Fall Vegetable Garden Update

I planted the fall vegetable garden in my 4'x8' raised bed a couple weeks ago and thought it was time for another progress report. The tomatoes are still growing, or at least the cherry tomatoes are. They seem to be enhanced with the genetic make-up of kudzu and have taken over the garden effectively blocking out the sun and moisture from all the other tomato varieties I planted. Next year cherry tomatoes will be restricted to one, uno, single, sole, solitary, lonesome cherry tomato plant in it's own bed and no, I repeat, no volunteers will be accepted in the garden!

Today though I'll veer away from tough tomato talk and steer back toward the fall vegetables. So without further ado here is the fall vegetable garden update.

The radishes are coming along nicely. Please ignore the Bermuda weed grass that's creeping into the bed. The radishes are due for a thinning.

I'm pleased with the beets so far. I spaced them out much farther apart than the radishes but I have quite a few seedlings coming along. I haven't been watering regularly since I've been spoiled by the regular rains we've had this summer but our recent dryness has caught me off guard. The garden is definitely in need of the hose.

 

Cayenne peppers aren't something we eat a lot of but we have quite a few growing in the garden. I like to use them in my deer repellent concoctions. I've also found that my cayenne pepper and soapy water solution is effective against caterpillars (fall web worms) and Japanese beetles. I let the cut up cayenne pepper marinate in water for a couple days, add dish soap, then shake well. It kind of feels like a mad scientist project...

  

The green beans are producing prolifically right now. Hopefully they will begin to produce more than we can eat and we'll be able to freeze some for the winter. 

  

Have you "picked a peck of purple peppers" lately? There are several of these purple beauties growing the garden. I've never had any trouble from pests or diseases growing peppers and these purples peppers have been great. What is interesting is that they turn green when cooked.  

  

My favorite use for peppers: omelets! What's yours?