Indoor & Outdoor Gardening in Montana

End of Summer

2011-08-28T18:46:00.000-07:00

A post full of pictures as we look towards fall and winter. Since we've had a couple weeks of 80 and 90 degree temperatures each day and no rain, I am ready for snow.

The garden is doing pretty good! Mostly we've had lots of success this year. A couple challenges, but we've got good ideas for next year to prevent the same problems.

This picture shows two issues: crowded unruly tomatoes and a cabbage patch that we gave up on due to moths (note the chicken tractor in the background). Our solution for next year is to plant our row of cabbages down the middle of a bed and then a perimeter of tomato plants spaced a bit further apart (2.5-3 feet). The tomatoes should deter some bugs and the cabbage won't need to be touched until fall. This way it should be easier to keep the tomatoes pruned and orderly.

Another issue, we got powdery mildew on our winter squash pretty badly this year. I think that the powdery mildew happened due to us watering at night (we knew better than this but neither one of us likes waking up at 5 am to garden) and crowding the squash. Next year spacing will be 3 feet apart and we'll trellis cucumbers to save space in the cucurbit bed. We'll try harder with the morning watering, but until we decide to invest the money in an irrigation system we won't be perfect. Fortunately, I think the winter squash will be OK. It is ripening in the greenhouse right now.

We've harvested half of the potatoes and decided to let the other potatoes get a bit bigger. We also harvested our spring planted carrots. I would estimate that we got 30-40 pounds or more. We have an equal amount of carrots still growing in the garden for harvesting this fall.

Despite a very slow start, the shade bed is hanging in there and filling in just a little bit more each day. I would eventually love for this bed to be chock full of gorgeous plants and looking lush.

We have been so focused on improving our outdoor gardening techniques this year that the greenhouse has fallen a bit by the wayside. Again, we will eventually invest in an irrigation system out here which should make things easier. I tried to start some seeds in here during the middle of summer. Temperatures got too hot during the day so that even when I watered in the morning, the seedlings had died by the afternoon.

A comparison picture to show what our front planted bed looked like 2.5 months ago and what it looks like today. I miss the spring green grass! We've let our lawn go dormant this summer. It's too much effort moving sprinklers around just for grass.

Annuals are helping fill things in this year. Next spring I will be adding more lavender, some rosemary and more mums. I've got clippings going right now inside the house that I plan on tending to all winter.

Always looking towards the future, here is the plan for the berry patch. We amended and tilled the soil, adding nitrogen and sulfur to optimize fertility for the plants and pH. In the next few weeks we'll get the fence up! As soon as the ground thaws in the spring, we'll plant everything out.

Mid-Summer Day Dream

2011-08-01T05:06:00.000-07:00

Ta-dah! So much bigger and better than last year. We just got our soil test back from our local extension office. The results were: very high nutrients, excellent pH - do nothing!

We just got back from vacation and have some catching up to do with harvesting. It's amazing how much everything grew.

The flowers are going crazy. Lots of bouquets inside the house.

We're harvesting plenty of carrots and beginning to regularly get ripe outdoor cherry tomatoes. We spaced the tomatoes too close together so harvest is a bit hard. Next year we'll do 2 tomatoes across each bed and stagger the cage placement. We also need to be a lot more aggressive about pruning early on in the season. We love our scarlet nantes carrots the best but also enjoy purple haze. The purple haze carrots ripen pretty quickly and have a lovely color gradient from purple to orange and then yellow.

The fennel is ready to harvest. The celery is doing well as are the brassicas. We're just about done harvesting kohlrabi and ready to try for a second planting.

Our first crop of ever-bearing strawberries has slowed down considerably. Hopefully we've got enough season left to get one more crop. We enjoyed eating fresh strawberries so much that we didn't freeze and preserve any. Behind the strawberries, our rhubarb is growing very well and the garlic is just about ready to all be harvested.

Some of the lettuce is starting to go to the seed. At that point it becomes chicken food. Behind this is a relatively new planting of carrots. Even further back are the peas. They are covered in snow peas and sugar snap peas.

The shade garden is growing slowly but steadily. I imagine that next year or the year after this spot might look quite lush.

The elephant garlic is about ready to harvest. The black currants are in and ripe! These are pretty good for fresh eating, but we're looking forward to using them to make wine. We're getting a couple raspberries as well. These beds are looking pretty wild because we're moving everything out of them next spring when we plant the berry patch.

We're going to be up to our eyeballs in potatoes!! It's time for us to start acquiring bins, sand and burlap bags for storing our potatoes. Growing these is the easy part, now we've got to learn how to store them properly so that we get potatoes all winter.

The cucurbit bed is amazing! Last year we had some difficulty with squash not getting pollinated (I'm not sure how that happened given that we raise bees on our property) and/or blossom end rot. This year we're getting bunches of patty pan, yellow crook-neck and zucchini squash. We've also got butternut squash and sugar pumpkins that are doing well. The cucumbers are growing more slowly but starting to fruit. Note to self - next year we should plant the squash at the same spacing (i.e., 2 ft apart) but the cucumbers need to be a lot tighter (i.e., 1 ft apart).

The corn is starting to tassel. Maybe we'll get a couple ears of corn... not sure what is going wrong here. We have excellent soil fertility for corn, is it just too cold at night?

Our beautiful harvest from last night. We had meatloaf (locally raised beef) with shredded carrots and zucchini, sauteed patty-pan with onions and fennel, mashed potatoes and rhubarb crisp. Delicious!

Free Bantam Rooster

2011-07-07T21:14:00.001-07:00

Free 3-month old bantam rooster to a good* home. Perfect for the person** who wants a 5:00 am wake-up call and frequent reminders throughout the day to stay awake.

*Highly liberal definition of "good home".
**A teenager would be an acceptable substitute for a "person".

Don't Misunderestimate Us This Year...

2011-06-19T05:34:00.000-07:00

A bed by bed tour of our veggies.

The corn is only a couple inches high. We've had cool weather and lots of rain recently. I'm not holding my breath on the corn. It just might be too cool in our area. The aluminum foil polls are remnants of our crow-deterrent system. Basically, I strung sheets of aluminum foil across the corn - despite the white-trash aliens come hither look, it worked.

I mulched around the cucurbits with black landscaping fabric. Last year our cucurbits didn't do so well - maybe because of cool soil temperatures? Hopefully this helps a bit. Already the plants look bigger than at this time last year.

Our peas are starting to bloom. They're still pretty short, I thought these were supposed to get quite a bit taller? Behind is an empty patch that was recently seeded with beets, carrots and more beans. Originally we planted lima beans and then changed our minds before they had even germinated. At the far end of this bed is our little patch of outdoor lettuce. This is just starting to go.

Our middle bed is doing great! The strawberries are starting to ripen, the rhubarb has produced enough for several desserts and the herbs are also doing well. The asparagus is doing about as well as we expected for it's second season and the garlic we planted last fall is trucking along.

The 8 foot row of chives deserves it's own picture. I am planning on dividing some of these to plant in the landscaping in the front of the house. These were the first things I started from seed for our garden after our offer on the house was accepted about 2 years ago.

Picture proof that are strawberries are ripening.

Grow potatoes grow! We're growing german butterball, yukon gold, red pontiac, purple viking, delicata fingerlings and a mismatch of leftover potatoes from a few friends.

We've been getting a steady harvest of radishes that were planted between rows of carrots. We spaced the carrot rows 1 ft apart. I think next year that 18 inches would be better if radishes are to be inter-planted. The tomatoes are all doing well and have set a fair amount of fruit. The volunteer potatoes growing up between the tomatoes are also doing well, thanks for asking.

Our final veggie bed - the brassicas, etc. From foreground to background we have: Leftover leeks from last year, fennel, celery, broccoli, onions, broccoli, onions, kohlrabi, onions, cabbage and a bit of rainbow swiss chard for kicks. This bed loves the weather!

Look closely - the broccoli is starting to form heads! We have two rounds of broccoli out here. One group that I started in mid January and transplanted out to the greenhouse, then out to the garden. I think I might follow this cycle again next year because these plants are a month or more ahead of the rest of the broccoli.

Above is last night's harvest. We're up to our ears in lettuce in the greenhouse and have been giving/trading it as fast as we can. I'm loving the barter system. We've got lots of friends who are avid hunters and fisherman who have an excess of wild game, so we've been trading. So far we've gotten a few pounds of elk and venison steaks in trade for tomato and pepper seedlings, a few pounds of bear sausage for a bunch of lettuce and smoked salmon for lettuce. This has made for some delicious meals.

Our ladies were moved over to the future berry patch to help fertilize and prepare the ground. I've been reading Ruth Stout's book - The No Work Garden, and have decided to use some of her principles in the berry patch (namely - mulching with spoiled hay). We have a green manure crop under the hay and will be moving the chickens around this bed to eat some hay, eat the green manure and fertilize. This fall or next spring we'll stick our berry bushes in here.

We got all of our ladies in one picture! We have not lost a chicken yet. We're a little worried about them now that they're out of the securely fenced garden. I think that if a weasel or mink wanted in here, they could do it. Hopefully they stay away until we get the permanent chicken coop up. I'm leaning towards purchasing one on Craigslist and then building our own run. To me, that seems to be the cheapest way to get a nice looking coop. Building projects and the idea of going over budget scares me.. any ideas or plans that you would recommend for building one from scratch?

Lupin Love

2011-06-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

Our 30 some lupins around the yard are starting to flower. This is the first time that most of them have flowered. I started one packet of blue seeds and one of rainbow colors about 1.5 years ago. For those of you with a black thumb, this is the perennial flower to grow from seed! Despite my best efforts to kill these plants with epic droughts, they have all survived.

We originally purchased these seeds with the intention of using the plants as a green manure. They fix nitrogen in the soil and they also increase the availability of phosphate because of their acidifying effect on soil. We have very basic soil, so those are all good things for us.

I ended up getting a bit attached to these plants and couldn't bring myself to till them under. After a bit more research, we decided that lupin could also be used successfully as a companion plant around my other flowers. It doesn't need any watering, comes up early, tolerates Montana winters, improves soil fertility and looks gorgeous. What more could you ask for in a flower?

Another low maintenance flower - the viola aka johnny jump up. The variety above is supposedly an annual. This little guy in particular withstood -12 and 2 feet of snow on top of it for months. I wish my apple trees, and ferns had been as hardy!

One day it wasn't here, and practically the next day my bleeding heart was flowering. This was one of my favorite flowers as a kid. The lacy fern-like leaves - the dainty, curvy flowers - this plant should have starred in Alice in Wonderland.

Still waiting on the dianthus to bloom. This plant is getting much bigger than I thought it would! I think I'll be moving around quite a few flowers this year so that the flower bed makes a bit more sense.

Click here to go to Bloomin' Tuesday to see what's coming up around the world.

Let The Sunshine In

2011-06-05T17:32:00.000-07:00

Our garden is officially 100% planted. (Unofficially there are some leftover potatoes from our neighbor, some more shade plants, and two apple trees left to plant.)

Above you can see our berry beds. We've got currants, gooseberries, 3 different varieties of raspberries and 2 different honey berries in there. These will get transplanted this fall into the spot of ground we have designated as the berry patch.

We finished planting out the second half of the tomatoes today. The varieties in here include: early girl, cherry sweet 100, chocolate Cherokee, brandy wine, and a chocolate cherry tomato.

Our strawberry bed is booming! There are little green strawberries getting fatter now. We doubled the size of this bed by taking some runner strawberries from the main bunch.

Jeff is very relieved to see that our potatoes are coming up. This is the bed that he cares the most about in the garden. That and the berries, onions, garlic, carrots, fruit trees, rhubarb, cabbage, kohlrabi, fennel, peas.... truthfully, I'm lucky to have a husband who is equally invested in our garden.

Our sugar snap peas are getting bigger and starting to hang onto the fence.

I finished my first week of my master gardener class. In Montana we have an 8 week class that meets once a week for 2 hours that leads to the title of master gardener 1. After this there is another class and then an intensive hands-on course that you must apply to get accepted to. I am feeling very motivated to go all the way through.

From this week at class I learned the importance of soil testing. Based on the information presented, we will be testing the soil from our raised beds and from the ground in our yard to see what we're dealing with. I knew that nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and soil pH affected growth. I did not know that there were things such as cation exchange capacity that could also influence production. I am very interested in the results of the soil test and hope that any deficiencies that come up are easily remedied!

The big picture

2011-05-30T15:52:00.000-07:00

This weekend was the big weekend for gardening in Montana. Supposedly the chance of frost has now passed and everyone was busy planting everything out. Jeff and I finished planting the warm weather crops including tomatoes, squash, cukes, corn, and beans. Our brassicas, onions, beets, peas, celery, fennel, leeks, lettuce and cilantro have been in the ground for a couple of weeks and have tolerated the light frosts well.

The lawn finally started to grow and green up a bit more. I spent most of the day mowing our (almost) acre of yard and edging a bit. I'm proud of the results. The lawn was full of dandelions when we moved in and has suffered a bit from daily canine abuse. It's finally starting to fill in a bit more and we don't look like the neighborhood derelicts.

It's hard to capture with the diffuse sunlight, but we have a fairly nice view of the cabinet mountain range from our second story. Our neighborhood doesn't look too bad either. It's mostly woods and horse pasture.

More green grass... now is the time to savor it. In another month or two this will become pretty brown.

I spread grass clippings mixed with shredded leaves around the berries and the tomatoes today. Yesterday we spent the whole day helping our neighbor put in his garden. He has wonderful, rich soil of which I am envious. Every year he puts a layer of grass clippings on his garden beds and lets it break down. If it's worked for him, hopefully it will work for us.

Free of nettles and pine needles the back yard is barefoot friendly for the first time since we moved into the house 1.5 years ago.

I think our girl Zoe (the border collie mix) has noticed the difference too.

The end of the beginning

2011-05-22T18:24:00.001-07:00

We are almost done planting things out in our garden. This weekend I started hardening off the squash and cukes. Store-bought tomatoes were planted out yesterday despite our last frost date being more than a week off. Don't worry, I covered them with a plastic tarp that should act as a hoop house for the next week or two.

Some Photoshop magic spruced up our cloudy sky a bit.

We are ready for the hurry up and wait/water aspect of gardening. Our weekends have been consumed by gardening and lawn care. I don't mind the gardening, but raking an acre and burning the brush is quite a chore!

The chicks are getting moved around the garden. They took care of my squash bed for me and are now hanging out waiting to get moved out into the yard and future berry patch. The big concern right now is our dogs interest in the chicks. Once that wanes a bit we'll move them outside the fenced garden.

I ended up buying some tomatoes this year. The plants that I grew from seed were severely stunted. We have chalked it up to using cocoa fiber as a major component of our seed starter mix. We used cocoa fiber as it is a more sustainable material than peat. Unfortunately, it didn't work for us and we'll be doing another experiment next year to find a good sustainable alternative to peat. Any suggestions are welcome - so far I am thinking about using some material from ant hills in the area mixed with our sandy-loam soil.

The greenhouse is going slower than last year due to our La Nina winter and persistent cold temperatures. At long last, salad season is in full swing.

Our violas are doing well. I wanted to post this picture to show how these flowers bring together the colors from our house trim. Still loving my newly purple front door.

Dirt is good.

2011-05-17T18:23:00.001-07:00

We have officially kicked our little chickadees out of the house. Jeff and I were sick and tired of our upstairs smelling like chickens and the chicks were starting to jump out of the bath tub. They've got some nice nesting spots in their chicken tractor and a light in there to keep them warm. Temperatures are getting down into the upper 30's to 40's at night so we're hoping they stay warm enough. The chicks are about 4 weeks old now and seem to have nearly all of their true feathers in.

The chicks have all learned the delight of dust baths. It is so cute to see them learning to act like chickens. We saw an interesting behavior this weekend for the first time and were concerned. The chicks were sunning themselves by laying on one side with a wing out-stretched. It looked like they were dying, but we've since learned that this is normal chicken behavior!

My shade bed is barely coming to life. The ferns, hostas, hellebores, columbine and bleeding hearts are just starting to wake up. No sign yet of the astilbe. This bed got so water logged with snow from the greenhouse roof draining into it, I would not be surprised if some things died.

The strawberries are filling in nicely and sending out flowers. We've got an ever-bearing variety - fragaria. Jeff is very excited about the strawberries.

The honeyberries are in full bloom with several small berries that have set. I've never tasted a honeyberry so I am looking forward to trying some! Looks like we might get enough for a pie out of our two bushes.

My perennial flower bed is looking colorful! I just moved a bunch of lupine in here to fill some gaps. The bulbs have done nicely and are about to be joined by the dianthus in flowering. Everything else seems to be doing great in here.

The broccoli, celery, onions and other brassicas are doing very well. You can see to the right of the compost pile some flat ground. I turned the soil in this corner with some compost this weekend and planted out some fingerling potatoes. Eventually we'll build two more compost bins to the left of the current bin. Then from the right side of the compost bin to the fence we'll have another garden spot.

The flowers on our cherry trees are opening! These are doing wonderful and seem to enjoy the climate. Our two pear trees and one Italian plum made it through the winter. Unfortunately, we lost both of our apple trees for unknown reasons.

Overall we are feeling very satisfied with the way our outdoor gardening is going. We are so far ahead of last year and think for two beginners we're doing good. I'm about to start master gardener classes, so pretty soon the label beginner might not apply anymore - maybe "intermediate".

The front garden bed isn't turning out quite how I pictured it. The new plan in my head is to add a few crimson barberries as anchor plants and then cluster groups of plantings around that. The bare spots contain mums, coneflowers and black-eyed susans that are growing slowly. No real hurry on this bed, it's just cosmetic and we've got enough other projects that we're dealing with right now to worry about this.

The solarium is filled with plants ready to go outside! All of the squash are getting big and setting flowers. If the forecast looks good this upcoming weekend I might plant some things out a week early (last frost date = June 1) just to get the house back to normal!

Can't forget about the citrus, they've been flowering and flowering some more. This lime tree has set quite a bit of fruit! I'm imagining making some lemon-lime-kumquat marmalade...

Whew! We've been busy this last month. I'm looking forward to getting the garden planted out so that I can quit watering seedlings every morning and start enjoying the fruit (literally) of our labor.

May Flowers

2011-05-03T18:07:00.000-07:00

Click the Hyacinth to go to Bloomin' Tuesday

A couple things are blooming around the garden. Hyacinth are just about at full bloom. The asparagus just started coming up today.

Of course the daffodils are going.

Some volunteer pansies from the greenhouse adjusted nicely to a hanging basket next to our newly purple front door.

The mums that I started in the fall are blossoming nicely outside! The ones that wintered outside (that I took the cuttings from) are only about an inch tall right now.

Ready for summer..

They grow up so fast...

2011-05-02T17:37:00.001-07:00

The chicks are getting so much bigger... and so much more challenging to photograph.

All of the chickens minus one buff orpington stayed in the basket for a good 30 seconds as I got my camera set up... then all but 1 jumped out.

Above is "Bertha" our ameracauna. She remains much larger than the other chicks. Her feet are turning a blue-green color, does leg color reflect egg color to some extent? Our cuckoo marans have dark brown legs and their eggs are supposed to be chocolate colored. Hmm...

Above is "Molly" our little Banty. She remains the smallest and cutest of the flock with her feathered legs. We named the other four chickens after our grandmas. They just sounded like good names for chickens. No disrespect to our grandmas, they just had quintessential old-lady names which we thought worked well for chickens. The cuckoo marans are Virginia and Hazel and the buff orpingtons are Maxine and Evelyn. I think the fact that we named our chickens so obviously demonstrates that neither my husband or myself have any type of animal husbandry in our backgrounds.

Very slowly things are turning green in the garden! We tried to plant green manure crops for the first time this year. It looks like we timed it poorly. Perhaps if this hadn't been a La Nina year with increased snowfall, our timing would have worked. As I am posting this, we still have one mound of snow on the ground - in May! I can't wait to see everything get bigger. I would love to be able to see into the future and see what the garden looks like 5 years from now.

I finished painting the chicken tractor. Purple and forest green to match the trim on our house and because you can't go wrong with purple and green. This chicken coop will get moved around the garden. We are also prepping a berry patch and will move the chicken tractor over there for most of the summer to get some soil enrichment.

I hope the chicken tractor serves its purpose. We had a hard time finding detailed plans on the internet for free. Once we build the chicken coop this summer/fall we should have a good idea of what works and what doesn't. If not, we'll pay for some plans.

Chickens, etc.

2011-04-24T19:45:00.001-07:00

Introducing...

Our little flock of chicks! We actually have six chicks, but only five are pictured. Trying to take pictures of a flock of chicks is possibly more difficult than cat herding. On the left side is our little Bantam chick with the fluffy legs.

We've got two cuckoo marans. These ones have been the least peppy out of the whole bunch.

We have two buff orpingtons. Their docile demeanor seems to be evident already.

Our sole ameraucana has some attitude! She is constantly running around the brooder getting into the other chick's business. I would bet money that she remains the alpha chicken, if there is such a thing. We selected this seemingly random variety of chicks for cold hardiness and for their different colored eggs (why not?). We should get chocolate brown from the marans and blue-green from the ameraucana. The others should lay beige/cream colored eggs.

Our chicken tractor is being painted right now. It will end up dark purple to match our front door. We'll probably get this done in a week or two. By the time fall rolls around, we'll have a coop completed. We're excited about the utility of a chicken tractor, especially as we are getting prepared to add another garden bed for a berry patch. We plan to plant some green manure in the new garden spot and then move the chicken tractor around the bed to let the chickens work their soil-improving magic.

The garden is free of snow at last! The grass is greening up a bit despite the dogs best efforts to turn our yard into a giant mud puddle.

The most obvious signs of growth in the garden are in my flower bed. A variety of bulbs have come up and most of the perennials are putting out leaves. The shade bed with my hostas, hellebores, columbines and ferns is still doing pretty much nothing.

Today I planted 9 tomatoes in the greenhouse. There should be a mix of purple cherry tomatoes and some beefsteak tomatoes. I also planted out about a dozen purple bell peppers.

The herbs evacuated a greenhouse garden bed into hanging baskets to make room for more plants. The rhubarb evacuated itself into a strawberry-rhubarb pie that was delicious. (The strawberries were store bought.)

Still no salad from the greenhouse. I initially planted out seedlings a week or two earlier than last year (February). This would have been fine more last year's weather, but not this year. Those seedlings froze and died and so a second group of lettuces was planted. Cold temperatures and lots of rain have resulted in slow growth.

Bloomin' Tuesday

2011-04-12T19:04:00.000-07:00

Click on the mums to go to Bloomin' Tuesday at Jean's blog. It's a nice way to see a sample of what is going on in different areas of the planet.

This spring is especially exciting for us. We built our garden last May, so this is our first spring with a garden. I am in love with perennials! Every day my husband and I walk hunched over through the garden searching for any new signs of life and commenting on every little spot of green.

I can't even remember all of the different bulbs I planted last fall (much less where I planted them), so we are constantly surprised by new flowers. Things are pretty sparse, but they are alive!

In the vegetable garden, our outdoor rhubarb is finally starting to wake up!

In contrast, the rhubarb in the greenhouse is doing great. Mmm.. looking forward to pie and preserves.

The black September currant is the furthest along of any of the fruiting bushes or trees in the yard. Right now it is still hard to tell what survived and what died. With week long sustained -12 degree temperatures multiple times this winter I wouldn't be surprised if we lost some things.

The flower bed is full of perennials and bulbs coming to life. In a few weeks we should have hyacinths blooming. The dianthus wasn't phased by the snow; it is the sage green mound in the foreground. The Shasta daisy and lavender foliage both stayed green throughout winter and are difficult to make out in the far side of this bed. Painted daisies, blanket flowers, bee balm and phlox are beginning to make an appearance.

The strawberries are coming to life despite looking as if they were flattened by feet of snow. We doubled the size of the strawberry patch last weekend and are condensing the size of the herb patch to better suit our needs/taste buds.

Here is the big picture of what's happening in our garden. The beds have green manure crops growing in them which will be tilled under before our last frost date of June 1st. Thought your growing season was short?

Next blog post... chickens!! Jeff is building a chicken tractor this week and we pick up a few chicks April 22. We're excited to expand the homestead.

Spring Update

2011-04-01T17:25:00.001-07:00

Here are some pictures to illustrate what has been going on in our indoor and outdoor gardens. It's been going fairly slow the last couple months (hence, no posts). Primarily within the last week, the majority of our snow has melted and we've seen signs of life in some of our perennials and trees.

Our cherry trees are starting to put out some buds.

The lupine is starting to wake up. We didn't get to prune things last fall since the snow surprised us in October and hung around until just a few days ago. I will be cleaning up the garden this weekend and getting it ready for spring.

We planted a winter green manure mix last fall, but it didn't have time to grow. I'm happy to see that as the snow recedes, the seeds are finally germinating (5.5 months later!). Hopefully we can till this in by June 1st and have some extra organic matter added to the soil. With the green manure and the actual manure from last fall, our soil should be significantly improved this summer.

Clover did manage to germinate in the fall. It doesn't look like 2 1/2 feet of snow and -12 degree temperatures this winter even phased it!

There is still a foot of snow in some parts of the garden. When I look at the garden right now it looks like a wet, soggy, sloppy, depressing mess. It's hard to believe that we'll have it completely planted in two months.

Bulbs are starting to bloom in the perennial flower bed in front of the house. I planted the bulbs somewhat haphazardly last fall. Now I am thinking that this bed could use some evergreen plants as anchors so that spring looks a bit more green.

The rhubarb is my pride in the greenhouse. Hmmm.. how much longer until I can chop this down and bake a pie???

The chrysanthemum and coreopsis cuttings that I took in the fall are almost all grown up. They're relaxing in the greenhouse until I get brave enough to plant them outside. Maybe 4 weeks or so?

Also in the greenhouse, the peppermint, oregano, lavender, chives, and sage have all started to wake up. Below is the peppermint.

Inside the house, the germination and propagation station is cooking. Below are broccoli, arugula, chard and shallot seedlings for planting outside in about a month.

Tomato seedlings are a bit farther along. Some of these will be kept in the solarium and some will be planted into the greenhouse. Despite starting things fairly early (Jan 1st), the seedlings are still small. They had some difficulty with aphids which stunted their growth. This was dealt with by spraying the seedlings regularly with neem oil and a dish soap mixture.

The citrus trees have bloomed and have set fruit. A few weeks ago we noticed signs of scale and spider mites on these trees. Each tree got a sponge/toothbrush bath with diluted dish soap to remove the scale and webbing. Then they were sprayed down with neem oil. I might repeat this process again in a couple weeks. The scale is started to slowly come back, but the trees still look very healthy. At the same time that I cleaned them up, they were also fertilized with blood meal, bone meal and some beet root liquid fertilizer.

Its Spring Indoors

2011-02-13T15:10:00.000-08:00

Spring is in full-swing in the solarium and is just beginning in our greenhouse. We cleaned out the greenhouse today and started a few trays of seeds for transplanting into the greenhouse and outdoors. I discovered that the rhubarb in the greenhouse is starting to wake up. I'm looking forward to the first home-grown rhubarb pie of the season!

The greenhouse looks barren, but bulbs that I stuck in the soil last fall are starting to come up as well as some creeping onions that we use as scallions.

I potted some hyacinth bulbs and brought them into the solarium so that we can enjoy their blossoms and fragrance once they mature. It was 88 degrees in our "unheated" solarium today. Our house is mostly heated by passive solar, so it's been nice and toasty warm in the main part of the house.

A few trays of lettuce, broccoli, arugula, swiss chard, and spinach are just about ready to be transplanted into the greenhouse. Last week it was -12 outside and about 0 in the greenhouse, today it is 50 degrees outside and 75 in the greenhouse. With those kinds of recent and dramatic weather changes, we're trying not to jump the gun on assuming the greenhouse is safe for even fairly cold tolerant plants.

In another week tomato and pepper seedlings should be ready to pot up and bring into the solarium. Hopefully we'll get ripe indoor tomatoes and peppers by April this year. Within the last couple weeks we took out our scraggly cherry tomatoes and extremely productive jalapenos. What to do with a pound of jalapenos? I think we'll dry them and use them in chili.

The chrysanthemum and coreopsis cuttings from this past fall have filled out nicely. The first chrysanthemum blossom opened today. These are going to get divided one more time and then used in the up-and-coming perennial flower bed in front of our house. I don't have much experience with this kind of propagation so I'm happy to have my experiment go successfully!

It's still winter outside despite the warmer temperatures today. We were planning to head back up to the local ski hill for more snowboarding (we're there every weekend) but a knee injury kept us home and (happily) engaged in gardening.

2011 Garden Plan

2010-12-27T15:22:00.000-08:00

We are enjoying winter but starting to actively look forward to spring and summer. I've drawn up the plan for our garden next year with some slight modifications from what we did last year. This little sketch is not to scale and is leaving out a couple things that I can't figure out what to do with. It's amazing how quickly garden space gets used up. When people come see our garden they think it's quite large, but I could easily see Jeff and I making use of 3 or 4 times the amount of space that we've currently got.

We will also be growing more food in the greenhouse and solarium. We will be starting seeds in the next week or two. This will include tomatoes for growing in the solarium and some cool weather crops for planting out into the greenhouse around March or so. I can't wait to get our seeds in the mail and get things growing again!

Thanksgiving Gardening

2010-11-26T08:45:00.001-08:00

We have been loving the snow recently. We've got over a foot on the ground and may get up to another foot in the next couple days! Snowboarding season is finally on the horizon!

Obviously we're done tinkering in the garden for a few months at least. We were able to spread a few truckloads of manure and clear out the majority of the beds. We've got a bit of pruning to do this spring, otherwise the beds will be ready to go once the snow melts.

After some recent days of -12 temperatures everything in the greenhouse froze. There is a chance that the lettuce will thaw and perk up, but we might just begin to pick frozen salads.

In the solarium the tomatoes are doing pretty good. They're a bit more anemic looking despite fertilizing them regularly. I think it is the short day light that is doing that.

Despite the low light, they continue to flower and slowly fruit! The solarium temperatures are very similar to our summers here. During the coldest nights it gets down to about 40-45 in here and the daytime temperatures with or without a fire going range from 65-90! Pretty good temperatures to keep growing tomatoes. Someday we might supplement in here with artificial light, but we're currently trying to work with what we've got.

The citrus trees are growing steadily. They have been slowly adding more and more leaves since their initial shock of being planted and then quickly transplanted again. They all (meyer lemon, lime and mandarinquat) have fruit and are ever bearing.

The mandarinquat has several fruits that are ripening.

The lime tree just set it's second generation of fruit.

We've also got potted peppers in the solarium that are doing well. I think we'll have to pick these and stuff them with some sort of home-made venison sausage mixture.

The jalapenos are doing wonderful despite the low daylight. These must be pretty hot right now!

Despite living in Montana, our unique house allows us to try to garden year round. In one of our spare bedrooms there are some coreopsis and chrysanthemum cuttings that I started in the fall. Pretty soon I'll move these out to the solarium where I'll let them grow until spring. These will be going in the decorative bed in front of the house.

Fall Garden and Summer Highlights

2010-10-18T10:40:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe that it has been 2 months since I posted an update. We have been busy with our garden and with life. Here are a couple pictures that I meant to post and some recent pictures of the garden.

At the peak of summer things looked pretty good. We had some bald spots in the garden with some experiments that didn't work out, but we had a lot of success in the garden as well.

The bald spot in the foreground on the picture above is where we tried to grow amaranth. This just did nothing. Maybe the Montana nights are too cold. On the other hand, the quinoa grew 5 feet tall and we are letting it dry right now so that we can harvest it. We also discovered that the leaves of quinoa are nice to eat as well. The sunflowers did great. Next year I might devote a bit more real estate to the sunflowers.

A mix of veggies harvested from the garden and greenhouse. We had some colorful dinners this summer.

This past weekend we got a few truckloads of composted horse manure from our neighbor and spread it on the beds (we're not quite done). We also planted a winter cover crop of various things that we plan to grow now, and till under in the spring.

We've still got some cool weather crops growing in the garden. Recent nighttime lows have gotten down in the low 20's. Eventually we'd like to have some row covers, but can't afford that quite yet.

Below is a picture displaying some of our harvest. We got about 35 pounds of honey. Jeff is making mead and we're using the rest as presents and for baking. If you've never tried baking with honey, give it a shot. It's very easy to modify a recipe to use honey.

In the jars are some dried soybeans, huckleberry jam, garlic-pepper jelly, buckwheat honey, wildflower honey, and green tomato relish. We didn't get any ripe tomatoes from outdoors this year, but we did get about 20 pounds of green tomatoes. We've been eating green tomato pie and I made 12 pints of green tomato relish. I would recommend both of these if you've got green tomatoes to deal with. Here are the recipes I used:

Green Tomato Pie

Green Tomato Relish

Our cayennes from the greenhouse are drying. Pretty soon these will be flavoring our chili.

More later...

Summer Garden Update

2010-08-15T07:07:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since my last update, I kept waiting to post an update until everything took off and was huge. This hasn't happened yet and probably won't happen this year. According to the locals, this has been a challenging gardening year in our area due to early cool weather and lots of rain.

We've given up on a couple areas in the garden and are planting these sections with clover that we will later till in to add more organic matter.

Overall, things are looking pretty small compared to our neighbor's gardens. I wonder if this is caused by a lack of organic matter? When we purchased our soil we were shown a soil test that indicated the soil had 10% organic matter. We did dilute the good soil with ~25% sandy loam to create a soil that warms up more quickly in the spring. We also added in a fair bit of blood and bone meal to fix nutrient deficiencies. We did a drainage test that indicated our soil did not drain too fast. Still, I wonder if we may have created too sandy of a soil.

The scarlett runner beans are doing fairly well. Behind them you can see radishes that have gone to seed.

The sunflowers are looking good. We seem to be on pace with other area gardens as far as the sunflowers go.

We had fairly intermittent success with the carrots. We have yet to harvest any carrots and got rather spotty germination. I hear that some other people in the area had this same problem and attributed it to too much rain early on in the season.

The blooming radishes have been amazing. I had no idea these plants would get this big. Our bees seem to really like the flowers.

It took 3 separate tries of planting out tomatoes to get some to stick. We first planted out at our last frost date. Those plants are still alive but have grown no more than an inch in the last 2.5 months. We planted out two weeks later, these plants have maybe doubled in size. Then we planted one more time at the beginning of July. The large tomato plants you can see are those plants. It was a good thing we started so many tomato plants to experiment with!

Our (mostly) perennial bed is doing great. All of the herbs are booming. The rhubarb, asparagus and chives are also doing great.

The tomatoes in the greenhouse are finishing up. We've probably been getting about 5 pounds of tomatoes per week from the greenhouse for the last 1.5 months and maybe a couple pounds of peppers. We are looking forward to winter squash, melons and lots of basil coming soon.

The peppers love our greenhouse! These have done really well and have been easy to pollinate by hand.

The melons are slowly coming along. It has been challenging to pollinate these. Our success rate is pretty low (maybe less than 15%) but there are so many flowers per plant that we should still have quite a few melons. We've been trying to encourage bees to come into the greenhouse and give us a hand. Despite bringing in a couple frames of a few hundred bees and shaking them off in the greenhouse, still no luck.

The squash has also been difficult to pollinate by hand. Out of ~50 squash flowers, these are the only two that we've pollinated successfully! The varieties we've been working with include pumpkins, spaghetti squash (pictured above), acorn squash, patty pan squash and zucchini.

Any suggestions or ideas of what might be going on in the garden would be much appreciated! We're also currently trying to plan a fall crop of some plants. If you know of some plants that might do well in a zone 4 area for fall, let me know.

Bloomin' Tuesday

2010-06-22T19:18:00.000-07:00

Click on the Marigold to go to Jean's blog and Bloomin' Tuesday.

The marigolds in the greenhouse are getting big. These blooms are 3-4 inches across.

The greenhouse violas are sprawling. I know it's too warm for them but I can't bear to say goodbye to these plants. I tried to kill them without success this past fall and they sprung up in the greenhouse in February after freezing temperatures and months without water. The faces are getting a bit bleached in the afternoon sun.

This is a whatchamacallit. It's a perennial of some sort and one of the only perennials that is blooming outdoors. It looks like we won't see much excitement in the perennial flower bed until next year.

I've got a couple baskets of geranium that are basking in the heat of the greenhouse. These really brightened up the place and made it look a lot less utilitarian.

Harvest Monday

2010-06-21T19:02:00.001-07:00

Today's harvest included about 1.5 pounds of tomatoes and a 1/2 pound of peppers.

I sliced the tomatoes into 1/4 inch chunks and coated them with a little bit of olive oil, salt, pepper and some herbs from the garden. I left them in the food dehydrator for half the day and ended up with "sun-dried tomatoes".

I made the peppers into a hot garlic-pepper jam. We used it to glaze some chicken breasts tonight. What was left of the tomatoes after I snacked on them went into a pilaf. I'm really looking forward to the middle of summer when we have a major surplus of tomatoes and I can make a couple batches of sun-dried tomatoes.

You can finally see a bit of green from my roof-top pictures. Before I got in the garden and weeded for a couple hours today there was a lot more green. We decided to put down some landscape fabric on the edges of the garden as the grass and invasive weeds on the property were starting to encroach on our garden. This next weekend we'll cover the fabric with mulch.

Our potatoes were almost 8 inches tall before I raked back some soil on to them. Apparently planting the potatoes in trenches and then gradually raking the soil back onto the growing plants increases production. Forgive the wonky rows, the dogs dug in the garden a couple times before it was truly puppy-proof.

My favorite bed of the garden includes fava beans (foreground), soybeans and corn. Our corn was getting devoured by birds and we strung cut up pieces of cans across the corn. This has deterred the birds quite well.

Rasta Pasta

2010-06-15T20:13:00.001-07:00

Tonight's harvest resulted in what I am now calling Rasta Pasta. 1 lb 8 oz of tomatoes, 7 oz of peppers.

Added this to some Italian Sausage and Pasta. Yum!

Late Spring Indoor Gardening

2010-06-11T18:26:00.000-07:00

Our monster tomato plants are taking over the solarium. This picture was taken about 3 weeks ago after our first harvest of ripe tomatoes. I was so excited to have ripe home grown tomatoes this early in the season that I only remembered pictures after we'd eaten the tomatoes.

We've probably harvested 4-5 pounds of tomatoes so far starting about 3 weeks ago. I think next year we can move this up a month and have ripe tomatoes from the indoor plants in mid April by starting tomatoes January 1st indoors. (This year we started plants February 1st.)

Our mandarinquat, lime and lemon are developing larger fruit and are growing more leaves. How long until these are ready? I'm already planning on making some marmalade.

Here is a cayenne pepper from the solarium with a quarter for scale. I couldn't wait to harvest this sucker and figured it would be pretty mild. When I taste-tested this pepper I ended up having to drink milk for half an hour my mouth was burning so bad. Note: Cayenne peppers do not have to turn red to set your mouth on fire. We're planning on drying and grinding these peppers for our own cayenne powder.

Now on to the greenhouse... The tomatoes are enormous. We've pruned them several times and they're still pretty big. We haven't gotten any ripe tomatoes out of the greenhouse, but have full grown green tomatoes that are starting to ripen. I don't think we could speed this up much next year. So far, the time that we planted this year seemed pretty ideal (Started seeds in February, transplanted in April). Currently I am starting new tomato plants to replace these ones and the ones in the greenhouse mid-summer. I'm guessing in a month or two they'll start to wear out and get too gangly for us. Hopefully this year we'll have ripe tomatoes from mid-May to late fall. Every house should have a solarium and greenhouse.

This is a spaghetti squash growing in the greenhouse. Apparently, some years in Montana the summer is too short to grow these outdoors. To hedge our bets, we're growing melons, and winter squash in the greenhouse along with tomatoes, peppers, onions and basil. Next year I might add okra and eggplants to the mix.

Here are our peppers. Not quite sure how good they are doing, they are certainly putting a lot of energy into the fruit. We just fertilized these again recently and hope they get a bit bigger. If not, next year we'll start twice as many and jam them into their beds.

I'm not sure how worthwhile marigolds are as companion plants in the greenhouse, but they look so cute I had to grow some.

As the lettuce in the greenhouse has been bolting we've been replacing those sections with basil. We're planning on making some pesto once we have enough.

Here is tonight's harvest. Greenhouse hybrid tomatoes, debarao tall vine tomatoes (excellent flavor), oregano, antohi peppers, bell peppers, easter egg radish, winter density lettuce and tom thumb lettuce.

I combined our harvest with some violas, noodles, smoked sausage and cheese for a pasta salad. It was a delicious dinner!

Outdoor Garden Update

2010-06-06T19:40:00.001-07:00

Our outdoor garden is now completely planted. We could have planted some things (peas, potatoes, onion sets, garlic) earlier, but have been so busy with garden construction that some plantings were delayed a bit. Our area's last frost date is June 1, so the tender crops were planted according to schedule. We're still waiting on quite a few bareroot plants (daisies, butterfly bush, blanket flowers, hostas, astilbe, trillium, ferns) to make their appearance. Those got planted out about 3-4 weeks ago. I'm already looking forward to next year when we have some well established perennials to add greenery to our early spring garden.

Here are some pictures to show our progress outdoors. I'll post an indoor update later in the week.

Below is an astilbe (I think) planted out in the shade bed behind the greenhouse. This is the only bed that is mulched, eventually we'll put a layer of mulch on all the perennial beds.

A butternut squash. The winter and summer squash and cucumbers don't seem to mind the recent cool rainy weather.

Something really likes my swiss chard below. I can't figure out what it can be.. it's not Jeff, the dogs, a deer, or a rabbit... What could this be? This mystery pest has been chowing down on my chard, fennel, sunflowers, cabbage and kohlrabi. It's chewed things off at the stem and left a leaf or two as evidence. No snail trails have been spotted. Any ideas? We're putting out a garlic/cayenne/neem/soap spray to deter a variety of critters since we're stumped.

Our potato plants are poking their heads up out of the ground! I can't wait to for these to get bigger and to be able to harvest baby potatoes. We planted the potatoes in 10 inch deep trenches in the garden. As the potatoes grow bigger we'll gradually add more the dirt back on them.
Below are some radishes planted under a pea trellis. I got bored of trying to plant in straight lines everywhere so started planting shapes in the garden. Why not? These radishes got planted in a heart shape, the garlic in a spiral, and the carrots in wavy parallel lines.

Here are some pea trellises that I made. Not the most durable things in the world, we'll see how they do. For the other trellises that are needed, we've decided just to use stakes and chicken wire. That seems like the most practical, affordable and movable trellis style.

As neither Jeff or I had ever grown onions before, we're growing some from sets and some from seeds to see what works best for us. Betcha can guess which ones are from sets and which from seeds. The seeded onions (on the right, obviously) were started February 1st in our germination station, moved to the solarium, and then the greenhouse before being transplanted about 3 weeks ago. I'm not sure what we should have done differently to make these bigger. They weren't even close to being root-bound, so I don't think pot size was a problem. I know that with other plants (tomatoes, peppers) I spent too much time trying to harden things off - about 4 weeks. I guess there is a good chance that this is what I did wrong with the onions. Next year I think I'll keep all of my transplants in the solarium and start hardening off plants just a week before planting. Any additional input on growing better onion transplants?

I did OK growing marigold transplants. This is the first marigold to flower in our garden. About 40 of these are planted in the flower bed, among the carrots and tomatoes.

Our perennial/annual flower bed is pictured below. Eventually this will contain winter hardy gladiolas, stargazer lilies, lavender, lupine, blanket flowers, goblin flowers, shasta daisy, alaska daisies, bee balm, butterfly flower, coreopsis, creeping thyme, and phlox. In this picture you can pretty much just see some zinnias, marigolds and lilies. The zinnias and marigolds were started from seed about 8 weeks ago and I'm pretty happy with the way those turned out.

Well, that is what we've been up to. Any input on things we can do to help control pests or for growing better transplants next year is appreciated.

Done with dirt

2010-05-24T19:15:00.000-07:00

We finished moving dirt today! All of the beds are filled, the two massive mounds of soil are gone and grass seed is down. That makes 40 yards of dirt and 60-80 yards of mulch moved so far. Our backs and arms are ready to be done. Some pictures to show our progress since last October.

We burned some stumps and laid a lot of mulch to turn this field into a garden.

The fence has proven to be both dog and deer proof so far. Success.

The aerial view of the completed beds and planted trees.

Grass seed down. Its finally time to get to the fun part of gardening!!

Planting the Garden

2010-05-17T17:06:00.000-07:00

We had a wonderful weekend gardening. This is the stuff that I've been daydreaming about for 6 years now. Over half the garden was planted out. This includes: the perennial flower bed, fruit trees, raspberries, honeyberries, currants, perennial shade bed, lettuce, swiss chard, potatoes, onion and herb seedlings. We bought and planted strawberries and some fun herbs (like pineapple sage). I also seeded beets, spinach and some cut and come again lettuce mixes.

Eventually, this bed will contain a stone walkway down the middle. At 8 x 26 feet it's a bit too big to reach across for planting and harvesting. On the north end of this bed (furthest away in the picture) we are going to plant some asparagus, rhubarb and sunflowers. On the South end, (closest in the picture) we planted our strawberries. In between the two ends are a variety of herbs.

The view from above. I took this picture in the middle of a thunderstorm from our roof. Doesn't sound so safe, but I really wanted some proof of all of our hard work!

The view from the furthest bed. You can barely see some lettuce seedlings and the potatoes and onions.

Overall an excellent weekend. My shoulders are sunburned and my hands are tired. It seems like everything is the way life is supposed to be.

Outdoor Gardening and Finished Fence

2010-05-15T18:49:00.000-07:00

We finished the deer fence! It finally feels like we have a garden. Completing this part of the project allowed us to finally plant out our fruit trees, currants, honeyberries and raspberries. We will be planting out more over the rest of the weekend, but I had to post an update on the massive garden project.

Jeff is putting the finishing touches on the fence. We used 4" x 10 foot posts buried 2 1/2' and deer netting for now. Next year or the one after we'll upgrade to wire. We still have some soil to move and some beds to fill. We wanted to get the fence up first as we had fruit trees and berry bushes to plant. We're still 2 weeks ahead of our last frost date, June 1.

The fence looks gorgeous! Jeff did an awesome job. It will look even better when grass is growing all around the edges and there is a nice fresh layer of mulch.

An aerial shot of the garden. We've got one wonky corner in the back left. We were constructing our garden and pretty far along in the process when a neighbor came by and let us know where our property boundaries were. Turned out the guy who sold us the property had it wrong. Oh well, it worked out.
Our attempt at the American Gothic pose with our Italian plum tree. This was the first living thing we planted in our garden!

It's hard to see, but all of our fruit trees are in. We have 2 dwarf northstar cherry trees, 2 pear trees, 2 apple trees and one Italian plum tree. Behind that, we have 2 honeyberry bushes, 1 black currant, 5 heritage raspberries, and 5 fall gold raspberries.

Bees

2010-05-07T19:03:00.001-07:00

Our bees finally arrived today! We got two packages of Italian honey bees and are setting up two hives. We made sure to introduce the new members of the family to the pups who seemed to be quite mesmerized by the bees. The bees were very calm and even let our dog Zoe (the black and white one) lick them without stinging her. We sprayed them frequently with sugar water which helped calm them down.

Noah was not quite as sure about the bees as his sister. I wonder if he remembers when he ate a bee at 8 weeks old...

Honey bees are adorable. I was amazed by how calm they were.

Our two hives disassembled ready to take in some bees. The center parts are the brood chambers that go on the bottom of the hive. The queen will live down here and lay eggs. Each hive will get two brood chambers, one that will be more for reproductive purposes and the next level that will be for honey that we leave for the bees to feed themselves. There is a screen that will go between the top brood chamber and the next level, the super, that prevents the queen from getting out. When we harvest honey, we will take it from the supers.

I think I've got that right...

To get the bees into the hive Jeff pried out the above can that was wedged in a hole in the boxes the bees came in. After that was loose he literally poured the bees into their hives. They stuck together and very few were flying around. He probably didn't even need much protective equipment besides some garden gloves.

A couple good whacks to the boxes got most of the bees into the hives.

Pretty crowded in there! It was challenging to take a good picture as we did this around dusk and the bees were constantly vibrating to keep warm.

The queen came in her own little box so that we wouldn't lose her. We stuffed a mini marshmallow into the end of the box so that the other bees could eat her free once they were all tucked away in the hive.

It's not everyday you get to have your picture taken with a queen! The queen was placed into the center of the hive and then everything closed up with a layer of food in the middle.

It took about an hour to get everything done.

Now we're going to go watch some Winnie the Pooh.

Green Tomatoes

2010-05-05T19:10:00.000-07:00

Check out our 'maters! They're getting to be pretty big. We've been checking the big ones every day for signs of ripening, but not yet. This particular tomato is a greenhouse hybrid beefsteak variety ('trust') that I started from seed on February 1st. The temperatures in the solarium are perfect for tomatoes - currently minimums around 60 and maximum temps around 90-100. These tomatoes are growing in 5 gallon pots. They've had a diet of water and a little bit of blood and bone meal. They're in a south-facing window angled to allow maximum sunlight in and get 10 hours or so of full sun each day.

The variety above is a debarao tall vine tomato. I originally thought we were about 60% successful germinating everything by hand, but it's turned out to be closer to 80-90%. We still make our daily rounds with the paintbrush. These plants are covered in blossoms.

I don't know why I ever thought a tomato variety called "tall vine" anything would be good for growing in pots. Next time I'm getting smaller, more compact varieties. The greenhouse hybrid one has done very well. The brandywines have also done pretty good, however they've got some sort of fungus going on. It doesn't seem to be slowing them down very much and we've been treating it with a store bought organic fungicide.

These sweet antohi peppers were also started from seed february 1st and are growing in 1 gallon pots in the solarium. They're a bit slower than the tomatoes. I'm dying to pick these peppers and try them out, but I'm waiting for them to get an extra half inch in length.

These bell peppers are growing in milk jugs and don't seem to mind one bit. Maybe another week or two before I pick this pepper. Hmm.. should I roast and stuff it?

These antohi peppers were transplanted into the beds in the greenhouse near the beginning of March. The cooler temperatures in the greenhouse have definitely slowed down their growth, but they still look quite healthy.

We found a spot that lettuce seems to love in the greenhouse. This bed is about 24 x 2 feet, and 5" deep. This is on the north wall of the greenhouse and is a little shaded by the timber frame construction of the greenhouse. The lettuce, endive, arugula and spinach are all thriving back here. We've been having salads full of baby greens in addition to the mature heads of lettuce that are growing in a larger bed in the greenhouse.

Not a great picture (it was getting dark when I took this), but this is a cucumber plant in the greenhouse. This evening I was checked on the cucumber, melon and cantaloupe seedlings relaxing in the solarium when I discovered a fully opened flower on this baby of a plant! I did not expect a plant with 2 true leaves to start flowering this quickly. I probably ought to pick the flower off, but we've got back up cukes in case this one dies. We're going to see what happens with this one.

We're still working on the fence. The fruit trees and berry bushes are in a holding pattern in the greenhouse and are hopefully not getting too comfortable. The rain has been preventing us from getting the fence posts in the ground. It looks like things might be drying up soon though. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Raised Beds

2010-04-25T16:27:00.000-07:00

We've made some more progress on filling the raised beds. Just a couple more beds until we're done moving dirt! We're also getting much closer to having our fence up. Jeff has everything laid out and is renting a post hole digger tomorrow. I think that everything will look a lot better with the fence up and more well defined lines. Right now, this area of the yard looks like total chaos.

Maybe by next weekend we can plant our fruit trees, currants, honeyberries and raspberries out in the garden where they'll be safe from deer. Right now they are relaxing in the greenhouse, hopefully they're not getting too comfy.

Here is a close-up of our currant. We decided to try out a currant (Black September) based on the advice of an Idaho gardener who has had a lot of luck with them in a similar climate. Right now, it has the most new growth of all of the berry bushes and fruit trees. We may add more to the collection in the future when (and if!) we create a berry patch.

Blooming Tuesday, Etc.

2010-04-20T18:33:00.001-07:00

Our first daffodils of the season opened today! Click on them to go over to Jean's blog and Blooming Tuesday to see more blogs with blossoms.

We're harvesting lettuce, radishes, arugula and green onions out of the greenhouse on a regular basis now. I love that we have enough lettuce to have a home grown salad at dinner every night! These are some spicy salads with both arugula and radishes in there.

Look closely and you'll see some violas thrown in for color. Did you know they're edible?

An update on the garden work. We (particularly Jeff) have really had our hands full with the garden! The shade bed up against the side of the greenhouse is the only one left to be built. Next on the agenda is to put up a deer fence, and fill the beds with dirt! We just got our dwarf fruit trees, raspberries, honeyberries and currants in yesterday. Right now they are in a holding pattern in the greenhouse while Jeff works quickly to get things done! We'll post more about those once they're planted.

Solarium, Greenhouse, Dirt and Bed Construction

2010-04-16T12:49:00.001-07:00

We're making great progress on the construction of the beds and filling them with soil. Check back Monday night for a picture of our progress this weekend. We should have a couple more beds built and almost half filled with soil.

The garden looks so bare and utilitarian right now. I can't wait to see if full of flowers, fruit trees and greenery!

The tomatoes in the greenhouse are plugging along slowly. They all have flowers and are starting to set fruit. The minimum temperatures each night have been about 40 degrees the past few days. Tomatoes like a minimum temperature of 50, so this is pushing the envelope for tomatoes a bit.

Peppers also like a warmer environment than we've given them recently, but we're trying to see just how much we can get away with. We're growing the tender vegetables in 3 places to see where they do best. We've got peppers in containers in the solarium, in the beds of the greenhouse and have some seedlings that we just started for planting out into the garden after our last frost date (June 1). These peppers are also flowering and beginning to set fruit. We've got antohi romanian sweet peppers, jalapeno, cayenne and a bell pepper variety.

Next to the radishes in the greenhouse I've planted some sweet peas to grow up a trellis. This should look pretty when they begin to flower!

The arugula and lettuce are growing great in this spot in the greenhouse. We've started harvesting the lettuce and have been harvesting the arugula for a few weeks.

Our germination and propagation station is plugging along!

The indio mandarinquat is flowering. This tree is doing the best out of all of our citrus. It was the only one that didn't lose a lot of leaves this winter. We can't wait to enjoy this fruit. I'm planning on making marmalade.

Another shot of the indio mandarinquat. Behind this picture you can see the door to our bedroom. It opens into the solarium. We love our house and still feel like we won the housing lottery.

A view of the cabinet mountain range as seen through our jungle of tomato plants in the solarium.

Seriously, it's a jungle. These plants are almost as tall as me. With the plants up on a table for better light, I am starting to have a really tough time pollinating everything.

Some trays of onions and herbs thriving upstairs.

Baby tomatoes in the solarium! I would estimate we've had about a 60-70% success rate with our pollination. You really begin to appreciate the work that bees, butterflies and bats do when you are faced with the task of pollinating 40+ plants.

This is an antohi pepper inside our solarium. How long from flowering to mature peppers typically? 6 weeks?

Blooming Tuesday

2010-04-06T13:17:00.001-07:00

Today is my first entry into "Blooming Tuesday". Click the flower above to be taken to the blog that hosts Blooming Tuesday.

I was pleasantly surprised to see just how many plants we have in bloom right now. This morning felt like winter outside. We had snow and a low of 20 degrees, but its 100 degrees in the solarium and spring in the greenhouse. It's so neat being able to exist in three seasons all at once.

This viola was started from seed last fall and moved into the greenhouse over the winter. I attempted to kill it at one point when re-arranging beds in the greenhouse and preparing for new plants, but it didn't die. Now it's planted among the lettuce and arugula. I'm thinking we'll use the violas to garnish an upcoming salad. Aren't these flowers edible?

Ahh, my tomato plants. I can't wait to be able to post pictures of these plants in a couple months for harvest monday.

Maybe next week these jalapeno flowers will open. I think I'll still count these as blooms this week.

This is the best angle to photograph chamomile. If there is such a thing as an ugly plant, I think I might have to put chamomile in that category. I started this from seed last fall and have been growing it in the unheated solarium since then. Pretty soon I'll dry the flower heads, chop them up a bit and then use them when I make soap.

I believe that this is our lime tree. Its doing well inside our solarium and starting to set pea-sized fruits.

I think this is another picture of our lime tree (I neglected to label the lemons and limes, and forgot how to tell the difference). It was full of gorgeous blooms, but now it is full of equally gorgeous limes! (Or are those lemons?)

Another picture of one of our mystery citrus trees. In another few weeks, stop back in for some pictures of the indio mandarinquat tree in bloom. It's a bit behind the other citrus trees but will be bursting with flowers very soon.

Pictures of Progress

2010-04-05T15:29:00.000-07:00

The tomato plants in the solarium are getting huge. It's time to prune these monsters, but we hate the thought of doing it. I've been researching the pruning of tomatoes to make sure that we don't kill off our babies, but most of the information is on pruning to improve fruiting not pruning to control the height/size of the plant. Any ideas out there?

The railing in our upstairs solarium makes a really great place to place trays of seedlings. Above is a tray of lupine, followed by some herbs, onions, shallots and leeks. Beyond that are some more tomatoes and peppers.

These herbs will be used as ornamentals (and also for harvesting) in the bed in front of our house and in the 8x26 foot raised perennial bed in the garden.

This is my first try at growing chamomile. It seems to be quite a thirsty plant and not too attractive. Definitely won't grow this indoors in a pot again.

This picture was taken 2 days ago of the progress on the garden.

Ta-dah! Today we finished moving mulch. We have a small pile left to move for leveling. We calculated that we've shoveled/spread roughly 80 cubic yards of mulch. Thank goodness it's free. This has been a 6 month project interrupted by snow and soggy ground.

Eventually there will be 7 raised beds running parallel to one another, a raised bed against the greenhouse for a shade garden, a raised bed on the other side of the 7 parallel beds for flowers (bee food!) followed by a row of fruit trees with some beds of berries on the bottom right corner. We're definitely growing raspberries, but we were advised to not try blueberries or grapes at our local extension office. Any ideas for some other berries to grow? We're a zone 3/4.

As soon as we finished the mulch, we started looking at another garden spot for future expansion. You can see where the previous homeowners had their garden. Much smaller, at maybe 20 by 20 feet. We're thinking of creating a berry patch here in the future.

Now a look inside the greenhouse.

The radishes in the greenhouse are getting closer to harvesting. Maybe another week or two?

We transplanted some peppers to the greenhouse this weekend. The minimum temperatures are regularly between 35 and 39 degrees. I know this is a bit chilly for peppers so we've only transplanted out 1/3 of the peppers. The rest are relaxing in the solarium enjoying balmy temperatures between 55 and 100 degrees.

The south bed in the greenhouse containing arugula, winter density lettuce, black seeded simpson lettuce, radishes and then the peppers. Next time I plant arugula I'm planting 4x as much and only leaving a few inches between plants. I love this stuff! We never ate much of it before as it was always so expensive in the grocery store.

The greenhouse tomatoes are holding their own despite a slightly chilly week. In the foreground is a brandy wine tomato, followed by a greenhouse type hybrid, debarao tall vine and then a few more brandy wines. They've also been joined by some creeping onions that a coworker gave me.

All of the tomato plants are flowering! We have been busy going around and making sure that everything gets pollinated.

Hopefully this black seeded simpson lettuce is ready to harvest soon.

It feels like summer

2010-03-28T20:50:00.001-07:00

Today, a post with lots of pictures to show some progress. Above is winter density lettuce and giant noble spinach that was direct seeded in late September last year. Its been slow growing. The light in the greenhouse is not ideal. At some point in the future we may change the design a bit and paint to help scatter the light and reduce the shady spots.

These are our shallow beds (6 inches deep) with swiss chard, lettuces, arugula and spinach growing. We direct sowed these beds about 2 weeks ago. Temperatures in the greenhouse have ranged from 37-100 degrees in that time. Sometimes that range has occurred in the same day!

Not a great picture, but you can see how big the tomato plants are already. I took this picture in the heat of the day before we remembered to vent the greenhouse. I'll be planting some more tomatoes out in the next couple days, just waiting on road restrictions to lift so that we can get our topsoil delivered. We didn't luck out for a free source of that, but we did find some excellent topsoil at a reasonable price.

More beds in the greenhouse with arugula and lettuces. We started these indoors at the same time as the tomatoes but planted them out in the greenhouse 3-4 weeks ago. We've been harvesting the arugula recently. We used it in a pasta dish and also made flank steak pinwheels that tasted great. Its nice to have a source for this now as we can't get arugula in our town.

Above is a tomato flower inside our solarium. We have another brandywine tomato flowering in a bed in the greenhouse. All other tomato plants have buds that have not yet opened.

Can't recall if this is a lemon or lime tree! I didn't mark the pots because I thought that there would be no way I would mix up the trees. This tree has lost a lot of leaves but is putting out some new growth. To leave the fruits or prune them back? Hmm.. I think I know the right answer but pruning seems too harsh.

Our antohi peppers are starting to flower. The Jalapenos, cayennes and bell peppers are not far behind. Some will be staying in gallon pots in the solarium while others are planted out into the greenhouse as soon as the topsoil arrives.

A view of the solarium. Things have sure filled up with our booming tomato crop. Next year I think I will grow about half of the tomatoes indoors that I started this year. The real pain is watering all of these potted plants! It takes at least half an hour to do that and it needs to be done about every 2-3 days. I think next year it might make more sense to start 5-10 plants in early January for keeping in pots in the solarium. Then around the middle of February, it might be a good time to start plants that would then go to the greenhouse to live. Finally, around the middle of April plants that would go live outside could be started as that is 6 weeks before our last frost.

Right now everything is a big experiment. I have yet to find a great gardening book that really addresses our exact needs. Sure there are books that talk about constructing cloches, and cold frames, but an unheated solarium in a double envelope house that is south facing at a northern latitude is another beast altogether!

Lastly, a fun picture. It's not all work at our house! While I was cleaning up the yard my husband made me the rope swing that we've been talking about all winter. It's perfect!

Happy Spring - Garden Tour

2010-03-20T19:01:00.000-07:00

Our upstairs solarium is gradually filling up with more and more plants. In the foreground of this picture you can see some citrus trees, tomatoes, herbs, and in the background peppers, onions and another sea of tomato plants.

A picture of a 6.5 week old tomato plant. The variety is debarao tall vine tomato. In 6.5 weeks they have grown to ~2 feet tall and have started flowering. It looks like we will be keeping some tomato plants in the solarium and transplanting some to the greenhouse, even if the minimum temperatures out there aren't quite ideal. We never expected the tomatoes to grow this quickly. I guess they just love the solarium. At the current rate, maybe just another couple weeks until we can harvest some tomatoes? At this latitude and in an unheated solarium, we feel like we're navigating uncharted territories by using our solarium as a space to grow foods. Its certainly not easy to find charts and timetables that apply to our specific growing needs.

We started the arugula and lettuce above at the same time as the tomatoes. It's hard to believe actually, but they spent the same amount of time under grow lights. The lettuces and arugula were transplanted into the greenhouse ~ 2 weeks ago. Currently, the minimum temperatures in the greenhouse are between 33 and 38 degrees each night. Outside, the temperature regularly drops into the teens at night. Our maximum temperatures in the greenhouse range from 80-101 while outside the temps have maxed out at ~60.

These kohlrabi survived a Montana winter and continue to grow, albeit quite slowly. We don't have the heart to pull these plants out quite yet, even though we'll be planting tomatoes in this bed shortly.

Last weekend we direct sowed some different types of lettuce into beds in the greenhouse.

Our savory has been blooming in the solarium for a couple weeks now and looks so pretty. We are finally starting to harvest some of the herbs that I started from seed this winter. All of our herbs have been growing in the upstairs solarium on a railing.

I moved this coleus around several times this past summer and it eventually ended up with a spider plant in our unheated solarium. It has literally been blooming since the summer and has done well in the temperatures in our solarium. This summer I think that I will be growing a lot more coleus.

Perennial Bed

2010-03-01T16:45:00.000-08:00

Today we finished prepping the new perennial bed that is in the front of our house. I'm all for removing lawn and replacing it with a xeriscape-bed. Not only do I love that style, but I really hate mowing.

Our house before had grass coming up to the deck that was flanked by two small ornamental beds with gravel as a mulch. We removed the gravel and put down some of the local free bark mulch. Here are the before and after shots. Try to imagine the after shot with sunny blue skies and green grass.
It's hard to tell in this picture, but the bed extends out from the deck by about 8 feet or so. That makes for a lot of room to fill up. However, I'm going to keep plantings fairly sparse the first year or two since we've still got the puppies to deal with.

My plan so far is to plant a butterfly bush or two (next to the window on the right and on the left side of the bed perhaps?), and then some groupings of purple cone flowers, black eyed susans, lavender and maybe some thyme or candy-tuft. These plants should all be fairly low maintenance as far as watering and I'm hoping a little bit deer resistant.

If anyone has comments/suggestions about other plants to consider that might be lower maintenance or more deer resistant I am very open to feedback!

Seedlings in the Solarium

2010-02-28T06:55:00.000-08:00

An update on our seedlings. They have been removed from the artificial light gravy train and are now living in our unheated solarium. Night time temperatures regularly get down to about 50-60 degrees which is the minimum temperature that tomatoes will tolerate and continue to grow. During the day, the temperatures get up to 70-90 degrees depending on the amount of sunshine. Our days are now 11 hours long, so they are getting a fair bit of light during the day. The windows in the solarium are angled to allow maximum light to come through. It's really a great set-up.

Above is some lettuce and chamomile both started from seed. We're hoping to have a salad in a few weeks.

These pepper plants above really need to be thinned. We're just waiting for the local garden store to get in 4" pots. I was dreaming about planting these peppers out in the garden last night. Couple more months before that can happen.

Once we moved the tomato plants out of the seed trays and into these pots they really started to take off! They're getting pretty big. I'm thinking another month in the solarium and then planting these out into the greenhouse where some will stay, and some will wait for our last frost date to pass.

Our citrus trees are blooming! The lemon tree is heavy with blossoms. These smell so good. Unfortunately, the trees all lost a fair number of leaves during the winter so I think we'll be removing any fruit that sets to let the trees get some more foliage.

In the next couple weeks we'll be installing raised beds. I'll post pictures of that progress when it happens.

Seedling Update

2010-02-13T15:44:00.001-08:00

The seedlings are all doing very well. Everything sprouted faster than expected which I am attributing to the warm temperatures of the room that we kept things in. The room was about 75 degrees for the first week and a half.

Above are some pepper seedlings with some true leaves showing.

A few tomato seedlings. I can't tell, are these looking a little leggy? I've been thinking about adding some additional light fixtures but I'm not sure if it's necessary.

Above is some Russell Lupine. These seedlings look adorable and I can't believe how big they're getting. We planted these 2 weeks ago and expected germination to take ~3 weeks! We're going to plant a bunch of these in the garden. I think that these might help improve soil by fixing nitrogen and possibly phosphate. At a minimum, the flowers will be pretty and hopefully make for some good food for the bees!

Seedlings and Seed list

2010-02-07T09:13:00.001-08:00

Above is our tray of lettuce and arugula seedlings. We'll be putting these into pots and growing lettuce in the solarium in a few weeks. Below is some bibb lettuce. Compared to the last time I grew this next to a window these plants that have been started in our germination and propogation station are very short and stout. I guess the lights are doing the trick.

Next up, our intimidating list of things that we hope to grow this summer with some brief explanations.

To start with, for my birthday, my mom ordered me lots of flowers for a shade garden to go on the north side of the greenhouse and a flower garden for cutting and for our bees. These flowers will be fenced in the vegetable garden area since there are a bunch of deer around here. Eventually I'll get around to landscaping the house with some deer resistant plants, but not this year.

butterfly flowers
pink and lavender astilbe
oranges and lemons blanketflower
tall phlox mix
old-fashioned farmyard garden (mix of seeds)
CA giant mixed zinnias
perennial wild-flower mix
goblin blanket flower
mixed bee balm
painted daisies
winter-hardy glads
english aster
shasta daisy
field grade lilies
rainbow iris medley
royal helleborus mix
giant columbine
fernleaf bleeding heart
shady places hosta mix
jack in the pulpit
cinnamon fern
trilliam lemon
lupine as a green manure in some beds (supposedly fixes nitrogen and phosphate)

Next up, the vegetable garden. Some of the plants, such as the melons, peppers, and tomatoes will be grown both outside in raised beds and in the greenhouse as a bit of an experiment to see what they enjoy best. We're also planning to try and enrich the soil a bit by growing a lot of beans and peas this year to add some nitrogen to the soil. A green manure crop for the inpatient I suppose.

fave/broad beans - windsor
black jet soybeans
lima beans
snap bean
xera bush bean
scarlet runner beans
antohi romanian peppers
lantern bell peppers
early jalapeno
cayenne pepper
red burgundy onions
shallots
carentan leeks
giant musselburg leeks
purple plum radish
white icicle radish
white globe radish
easter egg radish (we think at a minimum this year, we can have some success with radishes)
swiss chard
rainbow chard
burpee's golden beet
bull's blood beet
purple top white globe turnip
early white vienna kohlrabi
brunswick cabbage
giant nobel spinach
tom thumb lettuce
winter density lettuce
arugula
green curled ruffec endive
bibb lettuce
black seeded simpson lettuce
hybrid cucumber american slicing
northern pickling cucumber
bush baby zucchini squash
flying saucer patty pan squash
small winter luxury pumpkin
butternut squash
green acorn squash
spaghetti squash
edens gym specialty melon
sweet granite muskmelon/cantaloupe
sweet favorite watermelon
debarao tomato - heirloom tall vine
trust (greenhouse) tomato
brandywine tomato
cosmic purple carrot
florence fennel
miniature blue corn (for popping and cornmeal)
sweet pea, old spice mix

I look at these lists of plants and think that we must be absolutely crazy to plan something this dramatic for our first real garden! But then again, the amount of work we're planning has got to be less work than raising children which millions of sane people do each year. At least the garden won't wake us up in the middle of the night. We also have plans to plant fruit trees (apple, pear, plum, cherry), berry bushes, grapes, potatoes and onion sets. Those things we'll be buying from a local nursery in the early summer when my mom is here to help with the labor.

A cool website that I wanted to mention is Ample Harvest. This website links gardeners to food banks in their area that will accept donations of homegrown produce. I'm anticipating that we'll probably have too much of certain plants (and probably way too little of others) so we'll donate the extras to the food banks in town.

Germination & Propagation Station

2010-02-01T11:48:00.002-08:00

We built (what I am calling) a germination and propagation station today. This transformed one of our spare bedrooms into a functional room as opposed to a large, empty closet! It's actually perfect for germination and growing seedlings as this room has it's own thermostat and the plants can be protected from our dogs. It's also nice that no neighbors can see the light on in this room. When we had florescent lights in the solarium to compensate for short winter days I think our house probably looked a bit fishy from the outside. I can just imagine the neighbors wondering: hmmm.. what are those two hippie types growing up there?

We didn't manage to get the sizing perfect as shelving units are sold in 3 ft widths and florescent lights are cheapest in 4 ft widths. However, we can expand this shelving if we need to at some point. All together, this was $230 for all of the light fixtures, the shelving, a power strip, timer for the lights, seed starter mix, trays and labels. And all purchased with a generous wedding gift from my mother-in-law. We'll be able to comfortably get 9 trays of seedlings in there. Once plants get going in here, we can transfer them to the solarium, the greenhouse or out into beds depending on the temperature.

Just wait until next week (or the week after) and hopefully there will be some green dominating the scene. Until then, the lights will take a break and we'll heat the room up a bit.

Violas and starting seeds

2010-01-30T15:33:00.001-08:00

We've got several violas blooming in the solarium. We started these as seedlings a few months ago and they are one of the few plants that were able to grow well with the low light conditions of a Montana winter. Next winter I think I'm going to hang some pots of violas and force some flowering bulbs as well.

We started a few seeds this week. This is probably a bit crazy considering its January 30 and our last frost date is around June 1. However, we're going to get them going inside the heated part of our house under florescent bulbs. Once they are tolerant of a bit more cold, we can move the seedlings out into the solarium to get some real sun and harden up a bit. Once the seedlings outgrow that, we will move some things into the greenhouse to stay, and some to wait in beds for the threat of frost to leave. That, or we'll have our raised beds with hoops/plastic up and can plant the seedlings outside. We started some leeks, sweet peas (I love those), onions, shallots, tomatoes, and peppers. We are planning to grow half of our tomatoes and peppers this year in the greenhouse to see just how far we can extend our growing season. We may also pot up a couple plants to put in the solarium. We'll plant some more seeds again in 4-8 weeks when everyone else conventionally gets started just to hedge our bets in case our experiment doesn't work.

Spring in the Solarium

2010-01-18T12:15:00.000-08:00

Spring has arrived in our solarium. All of our citrus trees started showing new growth and flower buds within the last couple days. Above is the meyer lemon and below is our indio mandarinquat.

Below is the bearrs seedless lime showing some new growth and buds. I wasn't sure that the citrus trees would make it in the solarium as it regularly gets down to about 40 degrees during the winter, but it looks like they will pull through.

We are trying to think of ways to most efficiently utilize space in our greenhouse for this spring and next winter. I think that we could grow lettuce and force some greens in here fairly easily. The light is excellent, we just need some more pots.

Currently, we have the three citrus trees, some trays of little seedlings and several pots/planter boxes with herbs and some other things just for fun. I was playing around with starting some seedlings so ended up planting chard, beets and carrots in some of the planters.

We recently had to "harvest" the carrots as they were blocking light from some of the herbs. Below is a picture of that harvest, I think that all of the carrots we picked maybe added up to one smallish baby carrot.

Below is a picture from a few weeks ago of the greenhouse. Temperatures have regularly been at about 32 in the greenhouse on our colder nights (-15). We finally threw in the towel for growing food in there this winter. We were able to keep our little plants alive, but with less than ideal light in some areas and the temperatures, by the time we could harvest anything we'd be needing the space to get a head start on spring. I think that next year we will probably transplant some larger plants in to the greenhouse from outside (lettuces and things like that) as well as starting some plants in the greenhouse earlier in the summer. We moved into our home on September 25 and sowed seeds in the greenhouse on the 27th. At a minimum, I think that 4 weeks earlier would have given us a much better chance of keeping some things alive over the winter.

Finally, a picture of myself, Jeff and the puppies with our new Montana friends. We've been having fun playing in the snow, but are getting excited about spring being around the corner! We are hoping to place our order for seeds in the next few weeks.

Mold in the Greenhouse

2009-11-23T12:10:00.000-08:00

I was going to wait and post an update after we had successfully overcome our mold in the greenhouse. However, we've been dealing with the mold for a while now, ever since we fertilized the greenhouse a few weeks back. I'm not sure if the blood or bone meal had something to do with the development of the mold, or if it was the fact that we watered two days in a row and it's been fairly cold. Either way, the mold has gotten pretty bad. We haven't watered since we fertilized (maybe 2+ weeks?) but the soil remains damp. We used a heater for a couple days, but it only made a difference of a degree or two since the greenhouse is large.

The mold around the winter density lettuce isn't too bad. But the mold below on the bibb head lettuce is starting to overtake the plants.

Believe it or not, that is a slight improvement from a week ago. We've been opening the windows on days that get above 40 degrees and put a fan out in the greenhouse but it hasn't been enough. Short of investing a lot of money in getting power to the greenhouse, multiple fans and a heater, I think we just have to wait for things to dry out.

We're still not giving up on trying to grow some food through a Montana winter. We've got the upstairs solarium going with a number of potted plants. Things are doing very well up here as the light is excellent and the temperature staysmoderate. At night, it gets down to about 50 degrees or so, but that doesn't seem to be too cold. In the future, I think we will try to add some shelving so that we can make better use of this space. I would love for it to turn into a jungle of different plants some day.

You can see in the pictures that we've got a new addition to the house. We picked up Zoe last week from an animal shelter in Idaho. She is an 11-mo old border collie mix. She's a sweetheart who was surrendered to the animal shelter by her owners who kept her in their garage full-time. She loves being an indoor dog and cuddling with us on the couch. I can't imagine her living in a garage! She is a handful right now but is picking up basic commands pretty quickly. I think in a month that she'll be pretty well behaved.

This weekend we installed an invisible fence around our acre (out in the snow!) and have been training the dogs on it. They are doing pretty good with the training and we're hoping that they can be trusted off leash in the yard in a couple weeks.

Progress in the Greenhouse

2009-11-08T13:27:00.000-08:00

Progress in the greenhouse has been pretty slow, but things have been growing along steadily. We've lost less than 5% of what we planted and transplanted which I think is pretty good. The radishes above are taking off, and we'll be thinning them in the next couple days. It's still a hard concept for me to wrap my head around.

I've added a couple hanging baskets in the greenhouse. The one pictures contains some marjoram, chamomile, lavender and violas. I hope it looks pretty once everything grows up!

The fennel definitely looks like fennel. This must be a good sign, right?

Burpee's golden beets. These are finally starting to get a little bit bigger. Maybe in the next month or two we can thin some of these out and eat the greens.

This is bibb head lettuce. All of the leaf vegetables (arugula, endive, winter density lettuce) have been doing very well and making good progress.

Lastly, an update on the development of our garden. We're almost done mulching, but decided to burn out some stumps that were left at the edge of the garden before we mulch that area so that we don't set the mulch on fire. Good plan, eh? Once these get done burning, it'll take a couple more truckloads to finish mulching the garden. I'm already drawing up designs for the garden, figuring out fencing and thinking about ordering seeds in the next couple months.

Soil Testing (and More Mulch)

2009-11-02T15:53:00.000-08:00

To start off with, we bought a soil testing kit at the local hardware store yesterday just so we could know what kind of battle we're up against. A little late with regards to the greenhouse soil, but for some reason I had assumed that soil was very good. It turns out that the plants in the greenhouse have never even heard of a little something called nitrogen. The level of nitrogen in that soil and all other soil we tested from around our yard did not even register on the test we used. We also were quite low on phosphate- in the depleted range. The pH of our soil was fairly good, around the slightly acidic to neutral range and it turns out that we're rolling in the potash around here.

To remedy those problems we got a couple 50 pound bags of blood meal and bone meal. Cost around $100 for both. The blood meal we spread at a rate of 1 cup per 20 square feet in the greenhouse and the bone meal 1 cup for 30 feet. We'll test our soil in the greenhouse again in a week or two to see what progress we made. As far as the soil outside goes, I think our plan is to wait till we get some topsoil in the spring and just work from there. We're still debating about whether we want to do all raised beds or a combination of raised beds and a regular row garden. At that point we'll probably use some ground hoof and horn in combination with the blood meal to bring nitrogen levels up. Longer-term, we'll be using a crop rotation plan and growing some green manures eventually to increase nitrogen in the soil.

I wanted to share some pictures of our free mulch source. This place is amazing! Considering the massive quantities of mulch that they have, t is no wonder that they are giving this stuff away for free. I think each truck load we get saves us around $75 to $100 as compared to purchasing the mulch. Definitely well worth our time and effort.

These pictures don't even really do the giant mulch pile justice. From where I am standing to take each picture, I am probably standing on 30 feet of mulch.

Lastly, a gratuitous picture of a basket of soap that I made. I'm donating this to an upcoming fundraiser for the hospital I work at. There are 12 bars of my soap in there, some candles, a lavender eye mask and a loofah scrubber. I hope someone likes it!

Mulching at Night

2009-10-31T09:13:00.000-07:00

We've made some progress with the mulching. These pictures make it look like we're almost done, when in reality we've probably got about 15-20 more truck loads of mulch ahead of us. Thank goodness this stuff is free!

Anyways, here is what we did with our Friday night.

Mulching in the Rain

2009-10-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures of the future garden site. We will be starting of with a 50 x 75 foot plot. We have room in the yard to expand at some point, and have plans for a fruit tree orchard, but right now we're just concentrating on veggies and berries.

The garden will be just to the right of the greenhouse. It will back up to the trees and be even with the front steps of the greenhouse. You might be able to see in some of these pictures, or guess, that our soil quality is pretty poor. We're planning on using raised beds to overcome this, and bringing in topsoil. Eventually we'll have our own compost to add into the mix as well.

Most of the grass that you can see on the far side of the compost bin will become garden. We'll have to take out a couple trees to start with.

I took this picture standing on the western boundary of the garden. The garden will extend to about 5 feet from the driveway and the side of our house. It is about 50 feet from the greenhouse to the trees on the left.

Based on some comments from my previous post, and feedback from my all-knowing mother, we decided that the best organic bet for mass weed killing for our future garden would be mulching or "sheet composting," if you will. Today we hit the free mulch get-as-much-as-your-back-can-handle jackpot! This should be no surprise as we live in a logging town, but we feel very fortunate to have found such a wonderful source of mulch. The mulch has some larger pieces, but it has aged for some time (in a town of 2,000 people, how much free mulch can people really consume?) and has broken down a lot. To my largely untrained eyes, it looks like pretty good quality for free!

Despite the rain, we got our first load of mulch today. Hmm.. maybe 20 more to go? It looked like so much more in the back of our truck.

I'll post completed mulching pictures as soon as we are down. Hopefully the snow will stay away for another week or two while we complete this project. After that - bring on the snow!!!

Advice on weed killing

2009-10-23T05:18:00.000-07:00

If anyone reads this post - I would love to get some advice on large scale organic weed killing. We have a large area that we are planning to use for our vegetable garden next year. Maybe 100x75' or so. Currently it is covered in weeds that have seed pods on them. The weeds are dried out and dormant right now.

We are trying to figure out the best way to prepare this area for an early start in the spring. Our idea right now to do things organically is to mow the weeds and hopefully remove some of the seed pods by bagging clippings and disposing of this material. Then we're thinking about roto-tilling the rest of the weeds into the first few inches of soil. To prevent additional seeds from blowing over and to suppress weed growth in the spring, we were thinking about putting landscaper's black fabric down somewhat permanently. Then in the spring, we'll build our raised beds on top of this, and just mulch the pathways.

Does this sound like a good idea? Comments would be very appreciated!

Compost

2009-10-19T18:25:00.000-07:00

Jeff built us a compost bin today!

It looks great! Now we just need to find some things to compost.....

Finished product.

More Greenhouse Transplants

2009-10-18T19:57:00.000-07:00

We transplanted the rest of our plants to the greenhouse. They were looking pretty healthy, so why not? We're forecasted to have lows in the 30's this week, so it is a relatively safe time to put stuff in the greenhouse.

Here is some bibb head lettuce looking healthy.

Early vienna kohlrabi... (I have a hard time thinning plants - I know, I really need to get over this.)

Sweet curled fennel...

and some Brunswick cabbage.

We're crossing our fingers that things keep looking good!

What's happening in the greenhouse

2009-10-14T18:20:00.000-07:00

I mentioned before that we had some passive solar heating in the greenhouse. Here is a picture of the high-tech system we've got. Ta-dah! Metal drums filled with water. The sunlight hits these drums during the day warming the water which then radiates heat out at night. It is difficult to tell what gain we get from these, but it must be better than nothing. Unfortunately, with our hopes of winter gardening in such a cold climate we'll be needing some additional heating features and insulation. Right now, we have some experimental bubble wrap placed over top of some beds. That really seems to help and we might end up using some bubble wrapped hoop houses within the greenhouse. We'd rather not actively heat the greenhouse if at all possible.

Below you will see our current pride and joy - the radishes! We planted these about 2 weeks ago directly into the beds. They are just starting to get true leaves, but look very healthy. When we had a cold snap down to 1 degree Fahrenheit last week we lost a couple, but some were completely frozen and still pulled through.

Below are some onions that we direct sowed about 2 weeks ago. Grow onions, grow!

These are burpee's golden beets that we direct sowed 2 weeks ago.

Lastly, here is the arugula. We started these indoors about 2-3 weeks ago. I panicked about winter coming last week and we transplanted these way early against all of the sound gardening advice out there. However, we got lucky and most survived.

So that is what's going on right now! I wish we'd been able to move in to the house a few weeks earlier to get a better jump-start on winter. We've had snow 4 times already! It is crazy cold weather, even for Montana. Next year I'll be starting the winter veggie crop at least 3 weeks earlier.

Citrus & Snow

2009-10-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

With winter coming, we've been spending a good deal of time collecting firewood. I had never done this before, but with the cost of a wood permit being $5 it is such a cheap way to heat our home. I wasn't looking forward to getting our wood, but I've actually had a lot of fun spending time out in the woods while being productive. Here I am posing with the truckload of firewood that we worked hard for!

We're trying to get 2 cords of wood for the winter. Our goal is to heat the house with the wood stove only. I think we'll be able to do this as we've already been here 2 weeks with night-time lows consistently in the teens to 20's and haven't had to use any type of heating. We our very excited by how energy efficient our home seems to be! Our house is one of a couple hundred in the US called an Ekosea house. The way it works is very cool. Here is a link to a website about this style of home: Ekosea homes.

I'm hoping that the solarium will make a lovely climate for our new citrus trees. We have now got dwarf lime, lemon and mandarinquat. With the sun and temperature in the solarium I think they will thrive. I can't hardly wait for them to reach their mature height of 6-10 feet. The solarium will feel like a tropical jungle!

Lastly, some gratuitous pictures of the pets. Meet Chloe the quaker parrot.

Here is our puppy Noah. This was his first time in the snow. He loved it!

Look Closely

2009-10-07T13:08:00.001-07:00

Look closely and you just might see the rainbow swiss chard seedlings that we transplanted this morning into the greenhouse. We are crossing our fingers that these were not too small to transplant. I found conflicting answers about when to transplant from a variety of resources, and being the impatient person that I am - I went with the advice that you transplant right after the true leaves start to show up. I think part of my impatience is coming from the fact that winter is almost here. On the mountain next to our house we can see that the snowline is only a couple hundred feet above us. In fact, I think we're going to have snow tonight. Then later this week we are forecasted to have night time lows in the single digits!

In the picture above are the radishes that we direct sowed about a week and a half ago. They are doing great and I just sowed another row of each type - purple globe, white globe and white icicle.

These beds contain tom thumb lettuce, bibb head lettuce and arugula. Also started indoors and transplanted this morning. All of these seedlings had true leaves that have been showing for the past 2 days. Too early? We'll see.

This critter is estimated to be the largest threat to the crops in the greenhouse. This is our 3 1/2 month old puppy Noah. He loves to eat dirt and almost took out our sprouting onions this morning when we weren't watching close enough! Gotta love puppies.

Citrus Trees

2009-10-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

I just put in my order for some citrus trees. I chose to go with Four Winds Growers after reading excellent reviews online. Their prices are more expensive than other companies, but it sounds like the trees will arrive in great condition and be fruiting earlier than trees ordered from other companies.

Bearss lime

Meyer Lemon

I ordered an "improved" meyer lemon, a bearss seedless lime and an indio mandarinquat. Jeff wants to get an indoor mango tree as well, but we're going to wait a little while on that one.

In the greenhouse the carrots, beets and some onions started coming up. Everything else is doing really great. We are now just waiting on the leeks to germinate.

Greenhouse

2009-10-01T18:42:00.000-07:00

I'm so glad to finally be able to post some pictures of the greenhouse! We've been in the new house for almost a week and are having so much fun. The internet was just hooked up today, so it's back to life as we know it.

Before we had even finished moving our things over to our new pad, we had the greenhouse beds prepped and planted. This task took me and Jeff about 1 1/2 days of digging, watering and breaking up soil clods. It seems like the previous gardener used lots of peat in the greenhouse beds which were bone dry after 2 years of not being touched. We learned that just trying to water bone dry peat is like watering concrete! It doesn't work. The soil is nice and damp now though!

So far, only the spinach and radishes have germinated in the greenhouse and we are waiting on the onions, carrots and beets. In the solarium I have 2 seed trays going with lots of lettuce, chard, cabbage, leeks, onions, herbs, violas, arugula, turnips, endive.... and others that I'm sure I'm forgetting. These are going strong and I'm thinking about hardening off and transplanting in the next couple weeks.

We've got a min/max thermometer out in the greenhouse with a probe inside and outside. We've been getting down to 28-32 degrees at night outside, and the lowest greenhouse temperature was 48 degrees. During the day it's been averaging between 60 and 75 outside but the greenhouse has gone up to 110-120! I'm thinking we need to get some better fans installed than the small solar ventilation fans in the greenhouse right now. I don't imagine many plants will do well with such drastic temperature extremes.

So that is the story of the greenhouse at this point. Jeff and I are both drooling over the thought of our own fresh veggies soon! I've been digging up recipes with arugula and radishes to be ready for our first crops.

-Karen

First Frost and Starting Seeds

2009-09-21T19:17:00.000-07:00

I am still awaiting a shipment of seeds that should be getting here in the next couple days. In the meantime though, I bought some discount seeds($0.25 per packet) from the local hardware store just so that I could have something that was starting to grow. Fall starts tomorrow, so at least a couple of my plants are now getting their chance before the end of summer!

Tonight we put the following seeds in a starting tray: sweet marjoram, common chives, garlic chives, viola, chamomile, coleus, and lavender. These are plants that we'll probably be using in the solarium. I have some other herbs on the way, but didn't order these kinds for whatever reason.

On a side note, we had our first light frost out here in Montana this morning. It is a bit crazy to think of how excited I am getting for a garden that won't even get going before the first frost this year. Not surprisingly, I started researching various heating options for the greenhouse this winter. The girls at work were reminiscing about -30 degree temperatures today, and it seems like maybe having a heater to use during those cold snaps might be a good idea.....

Only a couple more days till we get to move in. Closing is on Friday at 2:30!

Avoid Heirloom Acres Seed Company

2009-09-19T08:52:00.000-07:00

Well I'm off to a rough start with the garden so far! I had ordered about 25 different seed varieties from Heirloom Acres Seed Company 2 weeks ago. I was hoping to have seeds germinated and just about ready to stick in the beds in the greenhouse by the time we moved in. I never received any information from Heirloom Acres about shipping dates and times, it just says on their website that orders rarely take longer than 2 weeks to be received. I've e-mailed them a few times with no response and left phone messages that go un-returned. Unfortunately, it looks like I was fooled by a slick looking website. Further investigation reveals that many people have filed complaints with the BBB over Heirloom Acres, have received no product and no refund despite many calls and e-mails.

http://davesgarden.com/products/gwd/c/3160/

For my next order of seeds, I've done some research and found a company with great reviews - Victory Seeds. Live and learn I guess..... While shopping on the internet is fairly common place now a days, this serves as a reminder to me to do some background research before purchasing a product through an unfamiliar company.

http://www.victoryseeds.com/catalog/index.html

-Karen

2009-09-14T07:36:00.001-07:00

I'm starting this blog as a gardening journal for me to organize my thoughts, track my progress and try to get motivated to complete all of the projects that are floating around in my head. I've also learned a great deal from reading other people's gardening blogs, and am hoping that I have some success with my garden that other people might learn from.

In about a week, my husband and I will move into our first house. We were lucky to find the house of our dreams that is loaded with gardening potential. It has a 2-story solarium that provides some passive/solar heating to the house, a large green-house, and an acre of rough land that needs to be developed.

Over the past 6 or so years as I've completed school, my husband and I have been chomping at the bit to get to this point in our lives. We both believe strongly in leading a sustainable and low-impact life-style to the greatest extent possible. Growing and storing our own food from the garden will be a big piece of that. We also plan to raise chickens for meat and eggs, and raise bees to start with.

On the horizon for our first projects, include some experiments with indoor gardening as fall and winter are approaching. I've ordered a variety of cold-hardy vegetable seeds that we plan to start in the solarium and then move to the beds in the greenhouse. We are dreaming of harvesting things like arugula and radishes while it's snowing outside. We don't yet know if this is just wishful thinking or if it is a definite possibility in the greenhouse. At this point, we do not plan to heat the greenhouse, but may incorporate some type of heating in the future. In the solarium, we will also be growing some indoor trees: meyer lemon, kumquat, kaffir lime and possibly mango. I expect that the short Montana days will have a significant effect on the flowering and fruiting of these trees, but we've got to at least try.

On the outdoor front, we plan to get started preparing the soil for the raised bed and row garden that we are already planning for next spring and summer. This involves removing an invasive weed, digging up some grass, removing rocks, and amending the soil. We've talked about trying to grow a short cover crop as green manure, but we might not have enough time to do that before the cold weather hits us up here.

Below are some pictures of the house that we'll be moving into soon!