I was doing really well getting myself to not stick things in my pockets, and it sure has been cutting down on the amount of odds and ends I fish out of the bottom of the washin’ machine.  Besides, I can’t stick all the things I need during the work day in my back pockets, even if I used both of them and then the weight, well let’s just say, I would definitely have issues.

Like I said, I was doing pretty well.

Last weekend it seemed as if there was something wrong with our only toilet in the house (heck, the only one on the farm unless you count the travel trailer.) Finally by this last weekend Dirt couldn’t take the slow and uncooperative toilet any longer.  He had tried everything. 

So out it came from in the house, onto our driveway and the maneuvering to dislodge the problem began.  Not being dressed in hazmat clothes, I stood back. 

Next thing I knew this sailed up the driveway to my feet.  “So how long have you been missing this?”

Well to tell you the truth, never, ‘cuz I always make sure I have several spares for when I misplace the one I have in my hand, or down the toilet as the case may be.  Drat! Just when you think you’ve cured yourself from a bad habit, you haven’t.

Or is it really “drat”? 

You know how it is when you have a really really old house, that needs some severe updating but you are too busy (and poor) to do it like you’d really like?  You’d like an actual shower where there is none at all, and change out the tub for a big soaking tub in a bumped out bay window area that over looks the pond (that one is really your husbands wish) and a huge sink to bath grandbabies. 

But because your house is old, actual bad things start happening, like leaks and drips and patches with linoleum, then rotting floors that you have to cover with area rugs until you can afford the time and money to do the project.  But eventually what started out as a little something now grows into what is in the above picture that you covered with a board and the area rugs.  You do after all, live in Roy.

You know you really need to do the project but it just keeps getting bumped and bumped and pretty soon you have to admit that the Big Project is not in your near future, a repair for safety and health sake should be, but you really want to wait until you can…

Then you do something dumb like drop your marking pen in the toilet and your husband has to take up the toilet to get to it.  When he takes the toilet up he can’t bear to put it back it is so corroded with iron and iron algae from over the years, nearly thirty years since you first rented here and who knows how long before that. The tank lid has been chipped for years and it is green, it matches the tub and the sink but it is green. (You never really minded the green but your husband hated it)

And because your husband hates it any way, he packs you into the car and you all rush off to the big box store and bring home a lovely new commode, in a nice faded iron algae color called “bone” .  But when he sets the new commode on the floor, to make sure the s-curve clears the water valve, he, and you mostly, can’t take the thought of that floor one more minute not to mention all the minutes between now and three years from now when you might have the money to really do things up right.

So back the the box store you go to get some subflooring and some inexpensive vinyl flooring to at least make it all livable until you can do it up right.   And now in the middle of spring, cold wet overworked spring, you have to go clear across the farm yard to potty, and you’ve decided to paint the walls as well, which because they are paneling is no small chore, and all this finds you in one big whopping project, in the middle of your busiest time, but the project still isn’t the big one you want to do.

All because you forgot you were trying to keep things out of your back pocket!

Well now we are ready to go.  The Harvest Baskets of VF&G are gonna roll out the first week of July!  Celebrate Independence Day by eating good food, real-ly good food.

Coming soon in July

The first season of VF&G’s Harvest Baskets!

Sign up Now!

In May!

Weekly baskets of seasonal, local produce

Designed by your family’s likes and needs

Grown and packed fresh by our gardeners

Paid and picked up by you weekly

I n July, August, September and October. 

Each season’s baskets packed with the seasonal produce that we grow

here at Vicktory Farm & Gardens with local affiliated family farms.

Looky here at the poster I made for FB…

That expressive baby is Ruby, she spends a lot of time on the farm, and knows just how good the food is here, so she’s our “poster child” for our Harvest Baskets.  The page under Eggs and Produce (tab up top of this page), Harvest Basket Membership, explains how our memberships work.  

We aren’t a CSA, if you know what those are, if you don’t, don’t worry about it, we aren’t one.  But we did steal an idea from them, prepacked weekly boxes of produce that customers pick up.  Our difference is that you pay for produce only when you pick it up, not a lump sum at the beginning of the season.

And our Harvest Baskets will be designed around each customer family.   How many people in the household, what you like to eat, how nice you are to my cats and old dogs…

That’s why we are asking for folks to sign up now, in May for July.  So we can get to planting the garden around our customers likes and dislikes.  If our customers like turnips way more than carrots?  Well then, the sowing will reflect that, as much as it possibly can.  I know, most of us in America are like Ruby, we love corn on the cob, but I can only plant so much, in good conscience.  You need to eat your green leafies too, and don’t forget your garlic and squash, punkins for carving and soupin’, and cut flowers for lookin’ at.

Well, Dear Reader, I’ve been spending many an hour at this computer screen, learning how to make forms (even if you aren’t signing up for HB’s ‘cuz you live in Wyoming, you should check out my questionnaire form), making cute posters on PSE10, and the weather outside has been beautiful, in between down pours.  Out I go to get some outside work done and pick some Cottonwood buds for the resin before they are all leafed out, to make some Balm of Gilead for a treat for my first Membership sign-uppers.

But someone determined that we ought to be calling certain days belonging to certain celebrations.  But no matter who or what we say we celebrate, whether it be St. Valentine, Columbus, Mothers or Fathers, or our personal birthday, all days belong to God.  All things are made by Him for Him.

Everyday we should thank him for our birth, for our mother and our father, for amazing men of courage that went before us or saints who grabbed hold of their faith full force amidst oppression and set us examples of living.

And everyday, not just today, we should recognize rightly what the earth is and our responsibility for it.

But today is tagged by someone somewhere that “today” is Earthday and instead of being cranky or ignoring it like I usually do, this time I will put down, pen to paper, (image to screen), what we, the Vicks, know of earth and our responsibility.

From the beginning, even before the fall, before weeds and pestilence, early and late blights, slugs, buttercup, thistle, even before all that and all that we perverted for our cause, and then the new “green movement”, we were never on equal footing with the plants and animals or to be under them, we the subservient, they the lords.  They were something else.  We were the only part of God’s creation, for he created all that exists, that was made in His image.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.  And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth”

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

And God blessed them.  And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Dominion is not a pejorative. 

Man is the one who has turned it so.  Man and woman together, twisted the words of their Creator, shortly after their creation, and ever since. 

Born out of our selfishness and self-preservation at the encouragement of evil, we swing wide one way and then in our own wisdom, which is no wisdom at all, we react and swing wide on another path the other way.  Missing God and His path the whole while.

Make no mistake, it isn’t the middle of the road we are to seek, not a balance between two ways of man, it is God’s road we are to walk entirely, wholeheartedly without reservation, no one foot over here and the other there.  We continually twist the words of God to what we believe is our good because we lack faith in God’s plan.  The plan that said:

And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit.  You shall have them for food.”

God has not left us on our own to “figure it out”.  Even after we turned from Him in the Garden, and before He sent His son to reconcile us, He taught.

And He still teaches, each one, in his own place, can learn if only we turn our ears to hear, train our minds to understand Him and not the greasy easy speak of the Evil One that speaks breathily with a false warmth into our ear to our selfishness and pride:

Listen and hear my voice; pay attention and hear what I say. 

When a farmer plows for planting, does he plow continually?

Does he keep on breaking up and working the soil?

When he has leveled the surface, does he not sow caraway and scatter cumin?

Does he not plant wheat in its place, barley in its plot, and spelt in its field? His God instructs him and teaches him the right way.

Caraway is not threshed with a sledge, nor is the wheel of a cart rolled over cumin;  caraway is beaten out with a rod, and cumin with a stick.

Grain must be ground to make bread; so one does not go on threshing it forever.  The wheels of a threshing cart may be rolled over it, but one does not use horses to grind grain. 

All this also comes from the Lord Almighty, whose plan is wonderful, whose wisdom is magnificent.

Mistake free living? 

Not quite, not by any means.  But ultimately each must learn to listen and do.  Knowing full well in front of Whom we will all stand one day, at the time appointed for us, on our own witness.  It won’t be in front of Brother Bear or Sister Eagle or Master Carrot. It won’t be with the support of Monsanto nor Joel Salatin, it will be alone with Christ.

The one I will stand before is the Creator of all and everything.  It is to God I answer to.  And that is greater than answering to any one part of His creation.  I will have to answer to how I treated his gift of soil, his gift of accountability to my neighbor, the marvelous livestock, the birds of the air, the fish in the sea. 

I will have to answer to whether I listened to exhortation and admonishment to live for Him or if I caved and listened to godless poison for my own selfishness and ease.  And I’ll be answering without the aid of excuse, of, “they told me…”, “I was only given…,”  “I didn’t see…” “I got confused, I thought…” because ultimately God has said that He will tell each one. 

He is the one who tells me how to take care of His ranch, I am his ranch hand and the care of it comes to me. Not because he needs me, but because he has called me.  I have dominion, you have dominion, over that piece that that he has set for each one.

Because he is the one who made the world and everything in it.  Every day, every where.

The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.  And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth,

having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that the should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for  “In him we live and move and have our being’

So fine, it’s Earth Day.  And so far as that means:

• A day to poignantly acknowledge the only true God, Creator of heaven and earth.
• A day to reflect on the fantastic gift that God has given into my care insofar as it is in my doing.
• A day to reflect on how I am doing on that score.

• A day to gather with like minded, God-fearing, God-hearing, folks to encourage and exhort one another to love and good deeds according to what God has given each one.

If today is that and not the worshiping of creation, setting it higher than the Creator or as the creator (how crazy a notion is that?)?  Then I say, have a pleasant Earth Day.

So first things first, is your garden ready for you to attack it?  Soil is a living thing and if you bother it too soon it will get grumpy (lumpy) and stay that way all year or at least you will spend lots of time in therapy together to help it get over your impertinence.  So knowing when to dive in is important.  Later there are techniques you can use to make it so that your garden soil is always ready for you.  But for now we’ll start here, with the basic soil wetness test.

No special tools, just naked earth and your hand.

Basically you are making a ball of soil in your hand and using your thumb, “pinching” it.  If it falls apart like you see it do in the video above you’re ready to play in your garden.  What are you going to do?  Add some soil amendments? Plant carrot seeds?

If it doesn’t break apart or if it only splits down the middle where you push with your thumb, wait for a few more dry days to work on your soil.  In other words, let it dry it out.

If you can’t even make a ball of soil, well you waited too long in the season and your soil is too dry or you are living on desert sand, I have no idea what to do for that.

Well as you can see I have at the very least one bed ready to rock and roll for this planting season, so off I go to get some work done!

I really do have many beds to work, in spite of recent record rainfall and gardening in one of the wettest areas on our farm, save the actual ponds.  How  can that be?

I garden mostly in raised beds, I’ve talked about it on other posts but I will cover the concept better in a near future post.  But really, for now, I gotta go to the HHH to sow some flats of cucurbits, and put to soak some peas to plant tomorrow, then I need to weed a couple asparagus beds and finish transplanting the rest of my summer brassicas, hopefully there will be time to plant some carrots and other root crops today.  We’ll see.

Unlike some of the other things that I start from seed, like flowers, tomatoes need good adoptive parents. Extra flowers I can just stick out any where on the farm and just let them go.  Tomatoes need staking and tying and harvesting or I end up with more guilt than this ol’ Catholic girl can tend.

So come relieve me of some guilt and get me some room.  If you have questions about the different varieties just message me in your own choosing and I’ll answer as soon as I can.

Paste/Sauce Type:

• Roma 6
• Plum Dandy 21
• Oroma 16
• San Marzano Gigante 3 -3
• Mama Leone 7
• Beaverlodge Plum 5 Great for hanging baskets

Slicers:

• Stupice 21
• New Hampshire Sure Crop 12
• Kellogg’s Breakfast 20

Purple

• Indigo Rose 14
• Japanese Trifele Black 14

Storage:

• Reverend Morrow’s Long Keeper 3

Cherry:

• Chocolate 16
• Early 15
• Oregon 12
• Black Cherry 3

The numbers after the variety name are how many I have as of April 10th.  First say so gets them for $3-4 each depending on variety, the purples, Chocolate Cherry, Rev. Morrow and Beaverlodge are $4, the other plum (sauce types) are $3.50 the rest are $3.  Prices will stay the same until they are all gone and I’ll hold them until you come and get them when you pay me.

So there it is, I will also have a few pepper plants and tomatillo plants but I’m not sure right now what all I have, not much I know that.  I didn’t really intend to have plants for sale, not this year anyway.

All tomato plants will be up potted to quart size with in the week and moved to their own little hut to stay until they are adopted.  I can’t ship, I don’t even wanna think about all that would be involved not to mention the regulations.  Yikes.  So this info is for local folks, you know south of Tacoma, WA.   Please don’t drive any farther than that, there are plenty of other places to pick up tomato plants between you and me if your farther than twenty or so miles.

The Hippy Hot Hut is crowded!  Packed full and I haven’t even dented what I was supposed to have in starts this year. The bench is full, and so is the north wall shelves, hanging bar and floor.

The bench is mostly propagation heat mat covered and in direct sunlight.  It is the main place where seeds and cuttings get propagated.  I’d like to tell you Dear Reader that it is the only place, but then I would have to hide the seeds and starts in my kitchen window.

The north wall area is warm but not as sunny as the bench it is a great spot for all the fuchsia pots and parts are sunny enough for some grown up sun lovers, but it is only slightly larger than the plants I use around the farm with nary room for increasing these for gifts for friends and for selling (Dirt’s favorite phrase).

Right now, this very week, things need to move off of the  bench.  I ran out of room for propagation a long time ago, it is now do or die, and some things are just plain going to have to be late.

Next year, I need to have an auxiliary house where seedlings and rooted starts can grow out at a cooler temperature with more elbow (and leaf) room.  Ultimately it is better for them, better for me and better for their later seeded garden fellows.

Tomatoes Move Out!

Three hundred tomato seedlings don’t take up much room, three hundred tomato plants become a jungle!

And yes, I knew this.  But each year I think I will magically solve the problem.  Guess what?  Problems don’t always get magically solved.  Who’da thunk it!

Day before yesterday, I painstakingly separated the tomatoes that went out to the Market Garden tomato hoop house all 160 of them.  Painstakingly?  Because I had to decide how many of each variety I really wanted out in the MG, and then which plant goes and which one stays behind.

The ones that stay behind will get up potted and put “somewhere” until my daughters can plant them out.  A few of those that stay behind will go into the empty places in my asparagus beds and other spots in the gardens around the house for quick fetching into the kitchen and snacking on while out working.

On to Other Things…

With the room from the moved tomato plants I got on a roll yesterday, up potting the peppers that will stay in the hot house just a little longer.  And I had my visiting daughter up pot a majority of my petunias.  I did quite a bit more after she left and I’ll finish the rest today.

Then I will finally get to seeding new trays!

And yes,  I know I’m late on a number of duties, tell me something I don’t know.

Blogs & Internet Work

Speaking of changing places.  I went into yet another downward blogging spiral recently when I was notified that Google Reader was going to be no more.  Ugh.

So the day before yesterday I decided to figure out what to do.  I believe I found the solution.  Netvibes.  I may even be in love with it.  We’ll see.

Netvibes (and trust me, I am no techie, so I could have this all wrong or at the very least all the wrong jargon) makes up dashboards for you.  The dashboard not only holds blogs you want to keep up with (like Google Reader used to) but it houses bookmarks and website favorites in a very organized manner along with a bunch of other groovy looking webby stuff that I have absolutely no time and therefore no business looking at or adding to my dashboard.

From your dashboards you drive around the internet.  And just like how you might have a commuter car, a family touring car, a farm truck, and a tractor, Netvibes has you make dashboards for different topics that you want to keep track of.

If I get too spread out  I have a tendency to get too overwhelmed, like the opposite of being overwhelmed because I crowd everything I need to do right on one page in front of me.  So yes, I have more than one dashboard but not one for every topic that’s for sure!  Right now I have two dashboards, my social network and Vicktory Farm & Gardens. I reserve the right to expand my needs as I see fit!

Essentially, so far I really like it. I personalized my Vicktory Farm & Gardens dashboard with the title:  Productive Performance thru Prudently Planned Practices.  It is the same subtitle I’ve given our Farm Manuals.  Maybe this year it will become a reality.

How often is it that we are far more concerned with the gifts rather than the Gifter?

A farm that we patiently waited to call our own, the animals that we breed and birth and tend, the children that we rear according to the Holy Spirit’s guidance, all these good and wonderful gifts, that we ask for, accept and then pet. Confident that “I have” because I wasn’t asking for it to spend it on myself, my passions.

Have the gifts, the calling, insidiously, become greater than Him? I can certainly step to the front of the line on this, all the while yapping my excuses of stewardship, honest living, neighborliness.  But stewardship, honest living, even neighborliness can so often turn into something else entirely and pride is most definitely in the brew.

And yet, if here in the temporal, I gave it all away, to minister, to purpose, out of nothingness, watch, then my pride would cling to the nothing instead. For even now my pride has me clinging to these things because of their “higher purpose”, gifts from God to do for Him.  The serving becomes the “thing” I skip the party for.

Every moment, every breath, belongs to Him.

And he wanted the post to be about him.  So here you have it, the latest Dirt miracle.

How We Form A Garden

Here at VF&G it is hard to find a garden that isn’t done up in a raised wide bed method of gardening.  The main Market Garden is all raised beds, sixty 50′ x 4′ wide beds.  The first half of the Market Garden was put in the spring of 2010 with a walk behind tiller and many flat shovels, following the method of how we have done all gardens since before I was we.  Various lengths, various orientations to N-S-E-W but nearly all 3-4’ wide.

I cannot imagine all the hours we have spent over the years carefully crafting new beds and then reshaping beds after tilling under manures, crop residue, or just changing for aesthetics.  But it is always worth it.  After 40 years of gardening, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can get far more production out of a garden done up in raised beds than the same square footage done in conventional single row or even wide row method.  I can work the soil sooner, plant sooner, weed if I want to easier and the plants seem healthier and more productive.

Whether a walk behind tiller was used or my new wonderful Lil’ Orange Tractor that Dirt bought me in June of 2011, a garden ready to turn into beds would look something like the left part of picture above.  Side note: On the right is this last year’s parsnip bed. The stick at the far end marks where the last ones were harvested, we still have about six feet of parsnips to liberate and eat.

Typically stakes are put in on both ends, connected by lovely reused orange bailing twine or a 48” lath strip is moved along as a marker, and the path digging begins.

The Problem

The other day, when I wanted to know how long it takes me to do up a rough formed bed (because after that comes the raking), I timed it.  It took one hour of focused carefully paced work to complete the two paths on either side of a bed. 

But it took all day, due to breaks and break downs and random interruptions, for me to nearly finish enough paths to make four beds ready for raking (rain and dinner caused me to leave the little bit of path you can see in the photos above.

Did I mention I’m old and getting older, with less free labor living at home and a desire to do more than make beds? And even though I carefully took over thirty minutes at the beginning of the day and ten each time I went back after a break, to gently stretch my shoulders, I spent the next two nights moaning and tossing in bed like a dying sheep.

The Vision

One evening, when I should have been writing a post or learning more Photoshop or Excel techniques, I found a video that showed a homemade attachment on the back of tractor tiller (a small tractor like mine) and the attachment took the loose flopped soil and formed it into these beautiful wide beds with a path in between. 

I’ve known for quite sometime that there were tractor attachments that went on ginormous tractors and made essentially several wide rows behind the enclosed heated, stereoed-up, cabbed tractor, Skagit Valley tulip farms are fraught with them.  But to have such a thing make my kind of garden bed, behind my kind of tractor that isn’t the size of my entire garden, oh the joy, and to see how simple it was, why hadn’t we thought of it five backs back?!

The fellow’s homemade implement in the video wouldn’t have worked for our situation, his beds were only 32” wide, and hardly a foot between, not how I like to garden, but it sure was close. Dirt took a quick look at this fellows work, and a few others I found on YouTube.  Then Dirt studied my tiller in operation and went about making a simpler and therefore more beautiful attachment that made beds to our specifications.  Knowing of course some tweaks would need to be made before it was finalized.

The Solution Realized

First off are the bed forms.  The tiller itself nearly makes a formed bed. But about a foot wider than my optimum four feet.  So even when I’m tilling over an already formed bed, like when I have a green manure crop to till in, or I just want to till in crop residue and start back over with a nice seed bed, I either live with too wide of a bed for my arms to reach center, or I pull in the edges with a rake or shovel and rake. 

So the soil coming out of the tiller box needed to be narrowed to four feet instead of fifty-eight inches somehow.

This grey piece of metal that my left hand is on that Dirt attached to each back side of the tiller box, shoves the tilled soil in the extra six inches each side and the pre-existing tiller flap that I’m holding up flattens it.

This is the view from my seat on the tractor as I was tilling with the new attachments in place.  If you look close you can see the stakes at the end of the beds that mark the four foot bed and the two foot path in between.  It is clear to see that even though the bed looks awesome there is still some beautiful carrot growing soil that is getting left behind in the path.  That’s why this is the prototype.

From my seat again while tilling, this is the part of the Tiller Hiller (which is real fun to say but not really what it is) that pulls the excess soil from the path into the tiller box.  Clearly its reach is not long enough and what you can’t see is, that for a freshly tilled over area, it isn’t deep enough either. That is going to be remedied.

The view from the other side.  It appeared that this “sweeper” wasn’t as long as the other but what “we” didn’t know was that the tiller box doesn’t actually sit center of the tractor.  It makes accurate lining up on a bed a little difficult but you learn to adjust when you’re tilling up sixty beds.  But now that the precision mechanic is involved I will most likely get my tiller box adjusted to the center.

To compensate for the short sweeper and still have fun getting beds done that first afternoon, Dirt walked behind the tiller, scooping up the excess soil from the path and tossing it into the tiller box in front of the tines.  I tried to relieve him at one point but I couldn’t keep up.  After we switched back I noticed why, besides being a girl, I was scooping far deeper into the path than he was.  Waste not, want not.  I’m also the cook that tries to get every drop of batter out of the bowl and off the spatula and into the baking tin.

What was amazing, even with me driving the tractor a little slower than I would normally, to allow Dirt to move the soil in, we still set up nine beds for planting in a third of the time that it took me to make paths for four beds.  And remember how smooth the bed was “raked” right behind the tiller?

That would have been another thirty minutes per bed at the very least, and it would not have been so beautifully ready for marking, furrowing and seeding or transplanting as this bed is.

Trust me, although my girls always knew that is what I meant when I said I wanted the beds raked out smooth, even I could never have raked them up that nice.

One More Teensy-Weensy Problem

We did walk out of the garden that evening with a bit of a disappointment, or so we thought. 

The six beds that will be going here including the current parsnip bed to the left of the picture is slated for tomato production. It will be the first time I will be moving away from a four foot wide bed. 

I watched and marveled at a video on basket-weave trellising tomato plants as they grow.  It makes a tomato hedge and so the beds would need to be two feet wide not four feet.  I figured it all up and taking two 4-foot beds and turning them into three 2-foot beds, I only lost a few plants worth of space.  Well worth the ease of trellising the tomatoes instead of staking and saving half the crop from rotting on the ground.  So I’m going to try it this year, but that means instead of the four 4’ wide beds I was going to make, I now need six 2’ wide beds.  And me with a tiller that makes these perfect four foot wide beds. 

The mental agony of thinking about having to hand dig those five paths and hand rake the six beds, now that I don’t have to for the other beds, killed me.  Until I slept on it and looked at it again.  The idea came from when Dirt and I first headed out to the garden to try his handy-work out.

If you look at this picture of the first bed we made with the new attachments, you can see that there is an un-tilled bed right behind Dirt.  It won’t be tilled up for quite sometime as it already has a pea crop growing in it from a fall planting.  I had carefully tilled right up to its edge about a month ago to prep this area for spring planting cole crops. After all I was just going to shovel out the path like I have done for forty years.  But now with the attachment, in order to “sweep” the loose soil from next to the bed behind Dirt, he had me go right up to the edge, moving the soil westerly, then again, until my bed edge lined up with the proper stake.

With that in mind I solved my tomato bed and laziness issue.  I’ll just carefully take a swipe with the tiller so that the “sweeper” is right up against the edge of the first two foot tomato bed and work on over until all the tom beds are done!  Ta Da.  In my head it works perfect, ran the idea by Dirt, he agreed that in theory it should totally work, I will be tilling some of the soil several times, something I hate doing but… there is that spot where two interests intersect, optimal healthy soil and optimal healthy back.

The attachment? A labor saver and a time saver?  Oh boy you betcha!  The only problem that remains, I can see that from the seat of my tractor I envision more gardens being put in!

It is vacation time from teaching for Dirt, that means picking up where he left off on big projects. 

On that list, the electricity in the Hippy Hot House was at the top.  Up until now my electricity has been delivered via drop cords, several.  Not very efficient and when water is present, a little nerve wracking. 

Since part of putting in electricity means going behind the plant shelf on the north wall, the shelf had to be moved, plants and all.  Before all was put back the shelf got redone from my emergency do up. 

Sometimes emergency do-ups stick around a lot longer than they should.  I never lost a pot off of the shelf and I talked myself into how handy it was that the water could run right off the shelf away from the wall.  And it even tilted the pots toward the sun. 

But really, I was only trying to make myself feel better for the shoddy job and the lack of desire to take it apart and do it again. 

So now I have a fixed shelf and electricity!  Two, two, two things in one!  It won’t be long now until I have a water heater in my HHH and I won’t have to heat water on the wood stove to water my seedlings with.

Dirt is awesome and it is a huge blessing to have such a handy husband, who by the way, is also handsome.  But we had a bit of a laugh over this job.  When he started it a couple of days ago he told me that he had his wires crossed at the garage where the power originates from.

 Yesterday, as he was finishing up, picking up tools and sitting on the step that leads into the Market Shed, I told him what I thought about having a handy husband.

I told him that I realize how lucky I am, how fortunate it is that my husband knows how to do a lot of things.  Then I told him when I thought about that I also realized that it could be a bad thing, because it appears that I have a handy enough husband to do things that could also accidentally kill me. 

…He’s on vacation, doing things he enjoys, he got a chuckle out of my observations.  

It’s that time of year again!

This is the time of the year when the soil is either too soggy or frozen, right now it is too soggy, to be doing much in the garden. The drainage ditches are all tidied up and doing their job, it just happens to be raining constantly. There is only so much space on the Hippy Hot House bench to fill with seeded and start-filled flats. Not to mention I’m fairly tuckered out and the next really busy time, lambing season, is only six to eight weeks away.

This is also the time when the catalogs start pouring in and accumulate into a lovely cardboard box. And now that is where they sit, next to my chair, along with my trusty garden note book, a box of tissues (no, I’m not sick, but it does work to hold my catalogs up from slumping) and my bread book is in there too, just in case I need a change of pace. I’m ready to begin my season of serious evaluation and planning.

King’s Mums

catalog is first up. It’s not just because it is the smallest, but I am enjoying the last of my cut chrysanthemums. With the recent chrysanthemum season just ending and still fresh in my mind it is time to evaluate where I’m at with my collection. What I might like to add; what I should aim to do different. Since I didn’t keep super accurate records, I better strike while the memory is still hot… er, warm.

King’s catalog is packed with information, general growing information as well as information about each individual variety. Each description contains the height of the plant (a few exceptions don’t remark about the height) and is accompanied with the bloom time along with type and size of bloom. Using the varietal stats to help narrow my choices I go through the catalog a few times before really getting down to final cuts.

Height

I deal with plant height first. Sadly it is a make or break cut for me, I’ve passed by some beautiful sounding blooms because of height. By the time any of my chrysanthemums for cutting begin to bloom I put them under some sort of cover. It isn’t because the plants can’t survive, but rain abuses the blooms, hard frosts don’t help and severe freeze kills. The early season bloomers, late September through early November, I’ll put under a short hoop in the garden, the crown of which is just barely over five feet tall. The later bloomers will flower in the Hippy Hot Hut to protect them from possible hard freezes. Even if the plants are in the more spacious Hippy Hot Hut, add two feet of bucket and a tall plant becomes six to seven feet. Just too stinking tall to manage, so I do not consider any of the tall varieties. And if everything else is equal, short wins every time.

Before any variety is even considered I go through the catalog and mark all the varieties according to their height. This is fairly easy because there really aren’t that many varieties in the catalog. (There are some on the web site that aren’t in the printed catalog and I make my order there, so I’ll check one final time before I order.) In the catalog on my first go through I don’t make any mark on the ones that are tall or the few that don’t say how tall they are. In all the other descriptions I underline the word medium and I circle the word short. Only after I’ve done that do I look at the picture and rest of the description.

Timing and Color

I love the idea of cut flowers year ’round nearly as much as good delicious fresh food year ‘round. Whatever I can do to extend that season into what is usually the improbable, I’ll do it, just shy of a lot of supplemental heat and light.

Chrysanthemums are sensitive to hours of light and the dwindling hours of day light in late summer and early fall signal them to begin blooming. Technically up here in the PNW mine should actually bloom before King’s stated bloom dates. But for some reason my chrysanthemums bloom far later even than what the catalog calls for. So while I have it fresh in my mind and some evidence still in vases and arrangements, it is a good time to evaluate and decide what to add and what to focus on.

For ginormous farm bouquets, dahlias and gladiolas take me from from late July through September, depending on frosts, possibly into October, with asters and zinnias filling in the crevasses. But then chrysanthemums begin to take over.

Since it is full on autumn when the chrysanthemums bring on their charms, when I started this venture I aimed for the deep earthy colors that reflect all that I love about autumn. Corals, buttery apricots, bronzy crimsons, burgundies, butterscotches, burnish lavenders and deep purples, the colors that help me tank up on warm. I’ll continue to round that color palette out.

I used to think of chrysanthemums as only autumnal. Their distinctive fragrance sings autumn to me. But now that I have been growing them for a couple of years and have realized how far into December I can carry the bloom time without a lot of rigmarole, I am happy to consider some of the other colors that I would have left out. Fill up on more purples, whites, and reds, deep ones and bright ones. And by the end of the season I wouldn’t mind a few light purples, nearly pinks and tender yellows, they’ll remind me of the gentleness in the season, like the pink candle in the Advent wreath. Thinking of the lighter colors today brought up some of my most memorable presents as an older child from my mom, the winter pastel sweaters and outfits in soft pinks and delicate yellows.

Bloom Type

I am unorthodox in my chrysanthemum growing (imagine that). Chrysanthemums are classified by bloom type, how the petals curl up or down or show a big center, have spoon or quill shape. And size, the big fat fancy ones, the special medium ones and then the little blooms and they are further bunched up by growth habit. All in all, thirteen class numbers that signify bloom and or petal shape, paired with three class letters that indicate size.

What I’m mostly after are varieties that lend themselves to casual bouquets, the ones that King’s says should be grown as sprays, with a few of the more formal types – single stem blossoms that are big and or exquisite. I don’t have any intention what-so-ever of exhibiting flowers or selling started plants. So the blooms that are strictly noted as disbuds are not super high on my list, but I don’t disregard them entirely. Disbud means that at certain stages of growth and budding you pinch off all but one particular bud so that the remaining bud is big. Big like the huge football mums your mom wore when she visited you with your dad on Dad’s Weekend at college, or the one that was in the corsages the older girls wore to Homecoming.

Different varieties need different buds saved, they aren’t all pinched the same. The catalog tells that in the description and so just to make sure I have that info, after I place my order, my King’s catalog will go down and live on a shelf in the Hippy Hot House for reference material.

I thought I would only use the disbud types for more formal arrangements where only a few blossoms are placed into structured greens or twigs. But having let some of them “go” and seeing that they are still really wonderful even when they aren’t what the breeder intended, I wouldn’t rule out just letting them grow in spite of what the expert says.

As far as the small blooms go, the ones that are grown for cushion mums, grown in groups of three or four to make a big ball of outdoor color in early fall or tucked here and there in pots of flowering kale for lovely fall displays, or the time consuming cascades, I might stick a couple of new ones of these type in my order. But only the cushion or short types, I don’t have the time to train cascades (they don’t do that fancy stuff all on their own you know). Right now, for the cushion or garden types I only have unnamed varieties that I have picked up over the last few years at garden centers and Costco. They are great for what they do, so I’ll only order more if I need to fill out my order to meet the minimum and fill in a color I don’t have.

The Chrysanthemum Season at VF&G

A week or more ago, I cut the varieties that are completely done blooming back to about nine inches, sprinkled some compost on the top of their pot, made sure their labels are intact and gave them a little drink of seaweed magic to make sure their sprouts are tip top for January propagating.

I have several more varieties left to cut back and feed for shoots. Often when I get part of a job done, like half of the varieties prepped, I get distracted, feel like I’m done, and forget that I have more work to finish up. So ordering up my new varieties, having the little catalog up front might just keep me from overlooking the notations on my calendar of chrysanthemum things to do.

Next week sometime I’ll finish cutting back the last of my stock plants, put a little more compost on everyone, add collars on some pots if they need them. Give a spray of neem oil for aphids. Boy Howdy will I be spraying for aphids! Chrysanthemums are crazy attractive to aphids, especially in the hot house.

Then in another week I’ll begin taking cuttings from the sprouts coming from the roots, dipping the cuttings in rooting hormone and then putting them in a nice soil mix. Making sure I don’t go crazy with propagating. I don’t plan on selling rooted plants only the flowers, and I can only hold so many blooming plants.

Trust me, food will always be at the top of our priority list, it is what we do, “we feed out friends”. But I find fresh seasonal local cut flowers as important as fresh seasonal food, or at least nearly so. They fill up the home and heart, feed the soul. My hope is to always send home a bunch of seasonal flowers, greens and twigs, with each harvest box.

My List

of already-haves, in order of bloom time here, classification & size number letter combo, King’s bloom time, height, sprays have double asterisk**, single bloom types have one, if the name doesn’t say it all, the color description follows:

• Honey Glow 4B S26-O12 M**
• Prom King 8A S22-O10 M ** (deep yellow)
• Prom Queen 8A S22-O10 ** (autumn pink)
• Coral Charm 4B O16-N1 M **
• Apricot Courtier 2B O10-N9 M *
• Purple Light 8A O18-O30 M**
• River City 1A O15 S* (incredible burnished salmon color)
• Obsession 4C 1024-N10 M** (white brushed with lavender and deep lavender centers)
• Frosty Time 4C O22-N2 S **
• Mount Shasta 1A O28-N10 M* (white)

The ones I will be adding this year:

1. Jefferson Park 1A O24-N30 M*Deep pink
2. Tobago 4B O24-N10 M** Deep red
3. Red Delano 4B O15-O28 M**
4. Indian Summer 4B S22-O10 M**
5. Samson 2A S28-O15 M** Deep red
6. Candid 5A O24-N15 M* Burgundy red
7. Artist Pink 7C O22-N1 M** Peppermint stripe
8. Seatons Toffee 10A O25-N10 M*
9. Diana Stokes 10A O28-N15 M* Maroon tips with silver rays
10. Icicles 11A O23-N3 M*

I know that is a lot of numbers and letters, the first number is the style of bloom 1-Irregular Incurve, 2-Reflex, 4-Decorative, 5-Intermediate Incurve, 8-Anemone, 10-Quill, 11-Spider

After the number is a letter for the size of individual blooms A-large, B-medium, C-small

The next batch of numbers and letters are dates – S September, O October, N November those are followed by either a M or and S, M for medium, and S for short plant height.

Wow, 10 new plants! I won’t be ordering for a few weeks and I may have to pair this list down even further. But if I order ten I think I get a free one. Ah freebies, reminds me of the debt crisis.