Cool Season Crops Wrap Up

Posted on March 20, 2013 by lars1273

Spring is here in San Diego and it’s time for me to write the wrap up about my first time growing cool season crops. The picture was taken in mid January. The garden was full of nice green healthy plants. The weather was still pretty ‘cold’ in January (I know, I’m a sissy from MN who can’t tolerate cold weather anymore). The chard did really well as you can see, and the broccoli was very productive.

In early January, I received the Gardener of the Month sign. Grant had come down and asked if we ever had the sign in our garden, and two days later it was. There weren’t too many people with gardens full of cool season crops but I still felt good getting the award. When the sign was moved 2 weeks ago, it looked like a gopher hole and I was looking for a tunnel and realized it was from the sign.

Here is the right half of my garden in the middle of February. You can see that the lettuce is doing great. I pick it every other day and can eat a salad a day with it. The chard is huge, and you can see a brussel sprout plant with monster leaves behind the white planter box. This plant grew big, but the brussel sprouts didn’t stay compact, they were ‘open’. We ended up taking this plant out since we weren’t getting any sprouts. Below is a picture of the one plant that gave us good sprouts.

Here is a shot of the left half of the garden. The picture above is of the plant in the lower left corner of this picture. This plant gave us 30 or so brussel sprouts before the aphids took over. We just ripped it out 2 weeks ago. You can see the artichoke plant is growing out of control. After clearing out some of the lower leaves, I realized there are 3 plants growing there…and now it is starting to fruit. The broccoli is also doing well. It is continuing to give us side shoots. We eat broccoli at least twice a week and it tastes delicious picked fresh out of the garden. I’ll post pictures below.

Here is a picture of our romanesco broccoli growing. This tasted great! We used this recipe to cook it. I will definitely be growing this again next fall.

Next season I will not be growing cauliflower. It only puts out the single head, attracts aphids and other bugs, and frankly, I don’t really care for it. I need to remember that if I don’t like it, no need to grow it, especially if it brings bad bugs to the garden.

I’m still having issues with gophers… They are attacking my onions now, and have taken out more lettuce and swiss chard. No matter how many I trap, there’s always more.The photos below are of a onion that just has the leaves above, and two dead gophers.

I should mention that I bought an egg timer to help make hard boiled eggs out of the eggs we get from the garden. I bought this on amazon to make it easy to know when they’re done. If you eat a lot of hard boiled eggs, you should get this:

Gopher Trapping and Garden Updates

Posted on February 19, 2013 by lars1273

Here is a photo of my garden 2 weeks after my last post. You can see that the swiss chard has been demolished by gophers, as well as the carrots and beets. This is when I started to research gopher trapping. I had to go out and buy to Macabee gopher traps. I asked my Grandpa if he ever had any trouble with gophers and he told me that his mom was quite the avid gopher trapper. He explained to me how to set the traps. It’s pretty simple to do. You have to find a fresh gopher mound, and then use a stake, rod, etc and poke in the ground to find which directions the tunnels run. Once you do that, you dig a whole and set a trap in each direction. Make sure you tie your traps together and then stake them down once they are set. This is to prevent the gopher from running off with your trap if it doesn’t kill it. You should cover the whole with a brick or paver once the traps are set. Then all you have to do is wait… Here is a link that might explain this better, it also has pictures.

Here is one of the gophers that I caught. After they finished off the chard, carrots and beets, they moved to the other side of the garden and started working on our romaine. This first picture is of the gopher in the tunnel where I caught him. You can see that I have twine tied to the trap and that is connected to the other trap that was facing the other direction.

I didn’t realize how small gophers were. I went to the University of Minnesota and am a proud alumni of the Golden Gophers. I no longer feel bad for killing them because they are eating my vegetables. I was somewhat scared to take it off, but with my gloves on, it wasn’t that hard. I through him over the fence for some critter around here to eat.

Since I lost quite a few chard plants, I went out and got a few more. The picture on the right shows the new plants. It is rainbow chard and although I’m not the biggest fan of it, I do like the bright colors in the garden. There are white, yellow and pink stalks that look awesome with all the other leafy green plants growing.

Where the carrots and beets were, I decided to plant a few more cauliflower and romanesco broccoli plants. These are growing slowly, but it’ll be nice to have a harvest in early spring (I actually looked in one of the romanesco plants and saw what it looks like, definitely click the link to the wikipedia page). I also planted some more kale here because I don’t mind it in my salads. We also have been running some through my juicer and mixing it with apple or orange juice. It tastes good and is very healthy for you.

I also planted a few additional strawberries in the corner of the garden. I really like the fresh strawberries from the old garden so I wanted to get more in at my new plot. These are an ever bearing variety and I have been pulling flowers in hopes of having these plants develop a strong root system and produce bountiful harvests.

I purchased a dill plant and another oregano plant. I added these to the herb corner. I am hoping to use the dill when I make pickles with cucumbers from the garden. Last year I wanted to make pickles and didn’t get around to it…hoping we do this time since I have a monster bottle of vinegar sitting in the cupboard.

This picture is of the ‘left half’ of my garden. There is the broccoli in the lower left and the artichoke on the right, with peas along the fence. There are two new plants, a brussel sprout and another broccoli in the bottom center of the photo. Most of these new plants were leftovers from when I helped a friend plant a garden in plastic storage tubs. I took pics and will post them up here soon.

Here is the broccoli corner, and one brussel sprout plant on the left. In the broccoli closest to us, you can barely see the broccoli head. Once the head is ready, you cut it and then side shoots will form and you can harvest broccoli for at least two months (and who knows how much longer…first time growing but just ate two nice side shoots tonight for dinner)

Here is the close up shot. It’s blurry…I’ll work on that in future pics.

My has the artichoke grown. First time growing one of these and have no clue how big it’ll end up

And lastly, some of the peas are ready for harvest. I use them on salads, pods and all

Four Weeks Later – My Plot at the Ocean Beach Community Garden

Posted on February 11, 2013 by lars1273

These pictures are fours weeks after the last post, so around November 1st. You can see that the flowers at the end are dieing, but everything else looks great. Going around the picture clockwise from the flowers, there is cauliflower, lettuces along the border, and a kale plant in the corner. In the bottom left are carrots, above that near the path is the swiss chard, and to the left are some beets.

The broccoli, peas and brussel sprout grew quite a bit. The peas look good but they will soon die out… Once the broccoli grew larger, I was unable to get my big body to the fence to help them up the fence. I also lost two of the broccoli’s to gophers. Gophers will be the next blog topic since they have done nothing but cause trouble in the garden…

The carrots and beets that we inherited with the garden ended up getting pretty big. We only harvested a few carrots and one beet because of the gophers. The one food my dad doesn’t eat is beets so I was curious to try them. I also wanted to save him a few since he was coming to visit over thanksgiving. The chard that is planted next to them also fell victim to the gophers.

Here is a close up of the swiss chard and a few beets. I did take a few of the beet leaves and add them to my salads. I was hesitant at first, but they actually tasted really good. I’ve heard that about other brassica family plants but am too afraid to try them. I’ll get some when I get back from mexico and give them a try.

Here is the one beet we harvested and some romaine leaves that we pulled from a couple of our plants. Greens are pretty easy to grow and I tend to not eat the salad out of the bags very fast and end up throwing it out. The lettuce out of the garden is nice and fresh, tastes great and lasts longer in the fridge. I’ve been able to pick enough to have a large salad every other day.

I have one last picture of a radish we pulled. We tried growing them at the house in a planted box, but they weren’t doing well. I moved the planter box to the garden and will try growing them there.

Possible Rise in Tomato Prices

Posted on January 28, 2013 by lars1273

I was reading MSN.com today and came across this article about tomato prices increasing. Not sure how this situation will turnout, but I am glad I picked up a second garden plot at the Ocean Beach Community Garden so that I can grow a whole plot of heirloom tomatoes.

This is the first post since September…sorry for the huge gap. Brian and I are going to start blogging much more frequently now. At the end of September, I joined the OB community garden and have been gardening there since. My next few posts will be about how it’s gone at the new garden.

Feel’s good to be back at Agridude.com again!

Cape Mayhem Garden Update – Tomato Questions

Posted on July 27, 2012 by lars1273

It’s been 2 weeks since I last updated everyone with how our cape mayhem garden is doing…sorry about that. I went up to San Fran and Napa for a 5 day vacation, then to Big Bear for Grant’s birthday blowout. Ill show you what’s going on in the garden, but my main focus is going to be on the tomatoes. This year I have been removing the yellow leaves/dead branches on the plants. I’m not sure if I should be. You can tell in the picture on the left that the bottom third of so of my plants are pretty bare (notice how there are no leaves in the next two pictures). I think as the tomato begins to fruit, it focuses on giving the water and nutrients to the fruit versus old branches/leaves. Can anyone confirm this to ease my concerns that I’m doing something wrong? This year I have also been watering way less than years past, just once or twice a week. I wonder if that has anything to do with it. To see if that is the issue, I have begun watering every other day. I am going to buy some mulch this weekend as well to help with water conservation. I will let you know what happens.

To the right are my Crnkovic Yugoslavian tomatoes. I have eaten 3 of these and they are uber good. I just realized that I should take pictures of the whole plant so that you can see how many tomatoes are on this plant, they are everywhere. Can’t wait for full on harvest mode so that I can eat caprese or bruschetta pretty much everyday. I brought in a green zebra and one of these in to work for an afternoon snack and everyone enjoyed it.

Here’s a picture of our cherry tomatoes. Again, I’ll take a picture so you can see the whole plant. These are great for salads, I pulled 8 this morning. One thing I have been noticing is that when I pick these, the skin splits. Am I picking too early? Are they just too juicy and bust the skin open? Am I squeezing them too hard like Chris Farley in Tommy Boy? After watching that clip, I need to watch this movie again ASAP.

To the right are my 6 corn plants. They are doing surprisingly well. I poured a bunch of blood meal in this part of the garden to help the corn grow. Blood meal contains tons of nitrogen and that is what makes plants grow. I have been reading that you need a lot of corn plants in order for them to pollinate each other. Anyone know if 6 is enough for that to happen? Leave a comment or I’ll figure it out by the end of the season…

To the left are my first super hot peppers forming. I have this one in a pot at the garden and we should get plenty of these devils this year. I cannot handle spicy food so I give most of these away. Last year we made the mistake of using them in Mike’s chili and it was fiery hot and we ended up making rice to help contain the heat.

We have 6 strawberries growing in pots and I found a few berries in there. I honestly can say berries straight from the garden are the best tasting. So good…wish we could get more out of the plants. I also don’t know why, but they don’t grow very large for us. Maybe it’s just my variety.

Here is Pete and I posing for a picture last Sunday after I was in Big Bear. The hat I’m wearing is his although I should probably pick one up for myself.

This weekend I am going to the nursery, going to add my 3rd tray to the worm bin, try to ‘use’ my finsihed vermicompost in the garden and go to the Muir Street block party on Sat. Should have lots of material to post on here next week. Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Cape Mayhem Gardens Update – July 10th

Posted on July 10, 2012 by lars1273

Sorry it has taken me so long to get another update on the blog. Happy late 4th of July from Cape Mayhem Gardens as well, hope everyone had a good day. We barbequed over at the garden and spent the day near the beach. We watched some good fireworks to end the night and then proceeded to take part in the Ocean Beach marshmallow fight afterward. Everyone brings bags of mallows to throw at each other after the works, very fun.

To the right is a picture of Jude and I posing in front of the garden on the 4th for a quick photo opportunity. Jude helps me take care of the garden and used to be my old roommate. We had overcast weather for the whole day but that didn’t stop us from having a great time.

There are a few new things that I did to the garden. I was unable to get rid of the powdery mildew on my cucumbers with the neem oil. In fact, I almost think it made it worse. I showed up to the garden on Sunday afternoon and they were entirely covered in it. I decided to take them out and put in some new plants that I bought from my local nursery. It’ll be interesting to see if I can keep the mildew away from these new plants. I bought a ‘lemon’ cucumber variety as a change up and I am excited to see how it turns out compared to other cucs that we have grown at the garden.

This picture is showing off the jalapenos and our serrano plant. The serrano plant is continuing to absolutely kill it. It comes up to my thigh and the flowers are everywhere. We have quite a few peppers on there now. The jalapenos are also doing well. I pulled about 15 of them and am going to make stuffed jalapenos with bacon. I will post those pics along with our recipe. Take a look in the picture and see if you can see an onion sprouting. It is in the bottom center of the photo and looks like a weed, it has 3 narrow shoots coming out of the ground. I planted a few onions in some of the open areas and we now have 4 that sprouted.

So this is Pete, and he lives in Vince’s guest house and built the tiki bar and the garden with me. He was grilling some zucchini, corn and chicken breasts on Sunday evening and let me eat with him. His girlfriend Stephanie also helps me a ton with watering the garden. She used to garden at her old place so it’s nice to be able to bounce some ideas off of.

Here is another picture of the garden with a nice action shot of Pete and I. You can see the tomatoes are getting huge. We are going to have to come up with some type of better staking of the plants. They are too tall for the cages I put them in and the tops are starting to topple over. We have been pulling out a lot of ‘dead/yellow’ leaves off the bottoms of the plant. It has really revealed all the fruit that is growing. Makes me so excited for harvest time!

The other updates for the garden are, I planted some more basil in between our tomatoes, and I planted 6 stalks of corn. I didn’t really get pictures of these changes, but I will for the next post, although I just noticed you can see the corn to the right of Pete and I in the picture above.

Cape Mayhem Gardens Update June 27th

Posted on June 27, 2012 by lars1273

I went over to the garden this morning after my bike ride to take some pictures and water. As you can see, the garden looks pretty good. Our tomatoes are green,tall and bushy, the pepper plants are doing great. We have started getting sunshine at the beach too! Since last friday, we have had the sun out all day. It has been very nice and I’m sure the plants are loving it. I gave them a nice deep watering this morning.

My Omars Lebanese tomato was struggling in the dirt. I was debating just ripping it out and throwing it away since it was not nearly as tall or healthy as the other plants. I decided to pull it this past weekend, but my friend Peter talked me into potting it to see if we couldn’t save it. I planted it in an old pot that we had lying around and we’ll see what happens. I am going to have to add some fertilizer to get some good nutrients in the soil for it to have a chance. I’ll give it some leachate tomorrow and see if it won’t turn it’s fortunes around.

My cucumber leaves are still covered with powdery mildew. I did not apply anymore neem oil to them today. I will have to do it tomorrow. I was debating pulling these and putting in new plants. I might see how they do over the next week or so. There are a lot of new leaves, but the mildew is all over the vines. I’ll wait to see what happens with the fruit production.

To the right is a picture of the serrano plant. This thing is going absolutely crazy! We have always had good production from our serranos, but the plants have never gotten this tall before. Sorry for the bad picture, didn’t realize the sun was going to bleach out the top portion of the pic. There are tons of flowers all of the plant and there are around 5 peppers currently growing. One cucumber vine wrapped itself around a serrano branch so I cut that loose and staked that branch up.

I did some pruning of the tomatoes today as well. I removed a lot of yellow leaves from the bottoms of the plants. I noticed that we have a cherry tomato that is beginning to turn red. There are also a ton of other cherries growing. I can’t wait for these to be in full production so I can snack on them while doing garden maintenance.

Here is a cluster of Crnkovic Yugoslavian’s tomatoes on our heirloom tomato plants. These should turn out to be 1-2 pound red fruits. Since I added the worm leachate two weeks ago, I have noticed that the leaves on this plant are growing uber large. I am excited to taste these and compare them to last years varieties of tomatoes.

The jalapenos are continuing to put out quite a few fruits. Here is a picture of 2 of our plants. They are actually larger than what we have had in the past. We like to make some stuffed jalapenos and we have been unable to do them with them from the garden because they do not grow large enough. We might be able to give it a try this year though! If we do, Ill post the recipe with pics.

Here are some other pictures that I took this morning. The first one is a close up of the right half of the garden. Basil is looking good. 2nd photo is the new homepage banner and is a full view of the garden. Last pic is of some pickling cucumbers that I pulled. I need to pickle them soon…

Cape Mayhem Gardens Update 6/18 – Garden Maintenance

Posted on June 18, 2012 by lars1273

So last week I noticed that there were white spots on the cucumber leafs. I did some googling and discovered that they have powdery mildew. The picture on the left shows a large patch of it on one leaf, but if you look at the other leaves, you’ll see a bunch of white dots on the leaves.

I was told that I could remove the infected leaves, but too many of them are infected that I don’t know what would happen to the plant if I removed them all. Here is a pic of the Neem Oil that I bought at Walter Andersen Nursery. We were all hanging out at the garden watching the US Open and I just happened to catch Jude biting his nails in this picture…

I removed a few of the very bad ones, and then sprayed the leafs down with Neem Oil. Jude had his friends Hall, an Agridude, and Christina in town from Raleigh, NC. They garden and told me how much of oil to put on the leafs. A light spray on each leaf should do the trick. I was coating them pretty thick so I had to scale back. We’ll see what happens in a week.

Hall and Christina shared a ton of good information and ideas with me. They showed me how to prune/remove suckers on tomatoes. Here is a link from my dad that shows you what to do. By doing this, it puts more of the plants energy into making the fruit versus adding new leaves to the plant.

They also told me that I should remove the lowest branches on the tomato plants, especially if they touch the ground. We also took out branches that had a lot of dead leaves on them since they are old and probably not doing much for the plant. Here is Hall doing the pruning on our Green Zebra tomato.

While I was up in Hell A visiting another Agridude, Grant, we went to his local garden supply store and found a bunch of onion bulbs. We planted 15 or so in LA in his garden, and within a week, they were shooting out of the ground. I bought a few white onions and planted them in my garden yesterday. You can see Kelly doing some pruning work for me too. I had done 3 plants and my knees and back were tired so I had her help me out. It is hard for a big man to get low to the ground for the pruning with so many other plants near by. The onions will only make that tougher…

I also took some of the leachate from my worm bin and diluted it with water in a watering can and applied it to the plants around the base of each plant. I did this to my patio plants and they all seemed to really perk up. I am curious to see how the plants in the garden respond to this feeding.

Here are some other pictures I took yesterday of the garden, enjoy!

Jalapenos hanging off the plant

Westside

Sliced, sprinkled salt on top

Agridudes Hall and Pete

Cape Mayhem Garden Status Update – We Have Fruit!

Posted on June 5, 2012 by lars1273

Well, it’s been a few days since I was over at the garden. I had my cousin Liz and her baby Chester in town for a week. I rode my bike over to the garden this morning to water the tomatoes since it had been a week since the last time. They might not have needed it, but it was going to be a warm day and figured that they could use it. Here is the left half of the garden.

Here is the right half. We have both slicing and pickling cucumbers on the trellis, 5 tomatoes lining the back of the fence, one giant jalapeño, 4 regular jalapeños, a serrano pepper, 3 uber hot peppers, mint, and strawberries (in the pots). All the tomatoes are heirloom varieties. We have Black Carbon’s, Omar’s Lebanese, Green Zebra’s, Tommy Toe’s (cherry) and Crnkovic Yugoslavian’s.

Today I noticed that we have a few green zebra’s starting to form, and a bunch of tommy toe’s starting to develop. I am excited to see that the tomatoes are growing, but I am thinking about why the plants aren’t nearly as tall as they have been in the past. There are probably many reasons, but I these are the ones that stick out to me so far: I planted later than normal. This means I bought my seedlings at the nursery later and maybe that extra time gave the plants less time to grow larger. I also did not stake the tomatoes when i planted. I put cages on them probably after 6 weeks. I normally do it when I plant, but they have grown so tall in past years that we were going to try to do a new custom cage, but never got around to it.

As mentioned earlier, we are growing pickling and slicing cucumbers. They are off to a terrific start this season. We have tons of flowers and the plants look very healthy. Here are two pictures of the cucumbers that we have already, the single cucumber is the pickling, and the group of 3 are for slicing.

I also noticed some small jalapeños growing:

That’s it for now. I’ll be posting some pictures of the harvested fruit when I pull them. I’ll also flush out the 3 uber hot peppers that we grow. I can’t remember the types right now…

Ocean Beach Cape Mayhem Garden

Posted on May 30, 2012 by lars1273

I should explain our garden set up in Ocean Beach in San Diego. We are fortunate to have a friend that lets us garden in his backyard which is one bock from the beach, and 3 blocks from Newport Avenue (our beach towns main drag) that has tons of restaurants and bars to visit. Here is a picture of our Ocean Beach Cape Mayhem Garden. It is a 15 x 8 plot where we used pavers to create a raised bed. Over the past 3 years, Vince has let me garden back here. Each year I garden, I start off by adding a ton of new top soil, (man)manure and other soil amendments because we are gardening on sand which is tough to garden on

Each year, we grow 4 or 5 tomatoes, jalapenos, cucumbers, serrano peppers, strawberries, mint (for mojitos), and a few varieties of uber hot peppers ie Scotch Bonnets, 7 Pot Jonahs, Black Habeneros. We have done some lettuces and spinach as well, but I do those on my deck at my apartment now. (Ill be posting some of those pics in the next week or so)

The garden lies behind the dark green house near the camper in this next pic. Be sure to notice the awesome beer pong skills of Mike and I.

Our friend Vince that owns the place rents his studio to Old Man Peter from Boston. He is a true AgriDude and you will be seeing pictures in the future of him. One day in Feb 2009 when Pete had just moved in, he, MSR and I decided to build a tiki bar and create a garden. After a few drinks, we made it to Home Depot (with a sober driver) to get supplies. With a hundred dollars for the tiki bar and prob another 75 for the garden, we had everything we needed. MSR and Pete are huge Boston fans and they themed the Tiki bar with Boston memorabilia. Here are some photos:

This year I planted the first weekend in April which is later than normal. The previous two years I planted in Feb and then in March. We are fortunate to have a great growing season in San Diego. Here are close up pictures of some tomatoes and our cucumbers on a new type of trellising system this year. We put a 1′ x 8′ ‘ladder’ style trellis horizontal from our pavers to the fence with the idea that they would grow up and along the ladder, but they grew fast and big and we had to support them with additional trellises to grow taller.

That’s a brief history of our garden in OB. We will be posting some photos from years past. I’ll also be posting some pictures of a worm bin project that I have to get some nutrient rich compost.

Agridude

Agridude – A Gardening Resource

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