Starting seeds

As usual this time of year, the siren call of the garden is practically shouting in my ear. The only way to answer it, of course, is to look indoors. It's late to start seeds in the house, but I finally got my rear in gear and got some planted.

By the way, if anyone needs to order seeds, consider Victory Seeds. We've been customers of theirs for years and they're terrific. (They're the only ones, for example, who solved our corn problem -- short season and high winds -- with a marvelous short-season dwarf heirloom variety called Yukon Chief.)

This year I planted:

• 25 cayenne peppers
• 25 basil
• 10 Brussels sprouts
• 10 broccoli
• 18 tomatoes (6 large, 12 paste)
• 10 red bell peppers

Here I'm taking cayenne pepper seeds from last year's harvest.

And Brussels sprouts seeds, also from our own harvest.

The nice thing about heirlooms is once you get going on them, they're pretty much self-perpetuating. I didn't get any broccoli last year because the aphids got the plants, so I'm grateful to a neighbor who shared some of her heirloom broccoli seeds with me.

Anyone else get anything planted?

Defrosting the garden

The garden is slowly defrosting. The gate is no longer blocked by drifts, for starters.

The potato beds, which were buried a few weeks ago, are now bare. This photo was taken February 15:

...and this a couple days ago:

One of the boxes holding grapes has weeds that will need to come out -- but it also has dozens of tiny thyme plants growing, seeded from the herb tire right next to it.

The thyme tire (no photo, sorry) is one of my older ones from several years ago, back when I was still figuring out the concept of tire gardening and foolishly put the tires on bare ground -- which meant, of course, weeds grew right up through them. We transported the tires full of herbs to a new spot, which kept the weeds intact. The weeds are easy enough to pull, but not the grasses, and over the last couple years the grasses have started chocking out the thyme. I'm going to empty the tire, fill it with fresh soil, transplant the baby thyme plants and start over.

The baby orchard is nearly free of snow.

Only about a week ago, there were huge drifts nearly burying them.

Now this is all that's left:

The young fruit trees look healthy and eager to bud. Here's a peach:

And here's an apple:

Not everything is snow-free, however. This quarter of the garden is still fairly buried.

Many of the Brussels sprouts I planted last year (and which got infested with aphids) have overwintered very well, and will produce seeds if I let them. I'll let one plant go to seed and pull the rest.

Most of the herbs did fine, but I suspect the rosemary didn't make it. (Shucks. I have to accept that rosemary doesn't overwinter very well.)

Here's oregano, which would seed itself across the entire garden if I let it:

Here's spearmint. It started as one tiny plant I bought at the local hardware store and is diligently spreading through the whole tire, which I'm encouraging. The nice thing about gardening in tires is I can plant spreading herbs such as mints and not have to worry about it infesting other parts of the garden.

Here's sage, which is the toughest herb I've ever seen. It handles winters beautifully.

The blueberry tires are free of snow, and the young plants are budding profusely. We might even get some fruit this year.

You can see the dramatic advantage of using tires in a snowy northern climate. The soil heats up and melts off the surrounding snow much faster.

So, while it's clearly too early to do anything in the garden at the moment, it's high time I get Brussels sprouts and cayenne peppers planted indoors. I'll probably get a jumpstart on broccoli as well. Spring! Glorious spring!

Sleeping beauty

In contrast to my poor friend in Maine who is blitzed with snow, our weather has been moderating of late.

For about a week, we had the frustrating conditions of just-above-freezing days and below-freezing nights. What this meant was snow would melt just enough to form puddles, which then froze solid. This served to turn our 300-foot driveway, nearby 1.5 miles of dirt road, and cattle feedlot into sheets of ice. We couldn't take the dog walking for days because footing was too treacherous. We sowed ice-melt along paths to the shop and barn, and that was it. I was praying we wouldn't lose a cow to a broken leg from slipping on ice in the feedlot.

Any outside activities meant we had to shuffle along like Tim Conway playing the old man on the Carol Burnett Show (remember?).

Thankfully the ice is starting to melt. Our daytime temps have actually gotten to 40F (yesterday it was a dazzling 47F!), so we're finally getting bare ground and safer footing.

This is our pasture. A stream of water is trickling down the middle.

Just yesterday the drainage path was covered with snow; now the snow is thin and rotten, and shortly will collapse into this little temporary stream.

Yesterday I waded out to the garden for the first time in months to see what I should see.

Now compare this viewpoint:

...with a similar location taken October 12:

These are the beds where I planted the potatoes...

...on October 13.

Here are the strawberry beds:

...and how they looked in August:

Here's our startup orchard. We planted an experimental orchard (four each of apple and peach, and two of plum) in huge tractor tires last May (blog post is here), and this is the first winter for the young trees in their new location.

...and a photo from last August:

The trees have healthy-looking buds. This is plum:

And this is peach:

One notable thing was how dramatically the snow melted away from the tires, leaving large rings of bare ground. Here in the cold north, the extra heat reflected off the black rubber is an advantage.

I noticed this little spider in the snow and assumed it was frozen solid. Nope, very much alive. A spider on snow, go figure.

Here are the tires where I normally plant either tomatoes or viney plants such as melons.

Here's the garlic boat...

...with a garlic plant poking around the snow.

The blueberries...

...also have healthy buds.

Here's a brave Brussels sprout poking above the snow. Last summer these veggies got inundated by aphids and I got no harvest, but it looks like several over-wintered well. Brussels sprouts are biennials, so I'll leave one or two to produce seeds this upcoming summer. Meanwhile I'll plant some in the house within the next week or so (Brussels sprouts have a long growing season).

The raspberries. In early April, I'll trim out last year's dead canes.

Sage, which overwinters beautifully here.

Two of the young grapes we planted last summer. I've never grown grapes before and I'm curious how they'll do this year.

Right now the garden is like Sleeping Beauty, waiting for spring's kiss to wake up and come back to life. Can't wait!

Garden update

Now that very early fall is upon us -- yes, in north Idaho we start noticing the effects of autumn in early August -- I thought it was time for a garden update.

As a brief recap for new readers, we don't garden in the ground; we garden in tires, mostly tractor tires. Long story short: heavy clay soil and too many weeds resulted in a nine-year battle for a successful garden. When we paved the garden space with tarps and gravel and installed huge honkin' tires filled with a lovely mixture of topsoil/ compost/sand, we've enjoyed a successful garden ever since.

First, corn. I got it planted late this year -- I planted it in two batches, June 15 and June 21 -- but I have absolutely confidence in this particular variety of corn.

Corn has been problematic for us from the start because of our short growing season and high winds. Tall corn simply topples over, and with few exceptions all corn varieties take too long to produce ears before the first frost hit.

So when I came across a short-season heirloom sweet corn at Victory Seeds called Yukon Chief, I was intrigued. Developed at the University of Alaska in 1958, it produces ears only 55 days after germination. This is our third year growing it, and I'll never grow anything else. It's a dwarf variety so the plants seldom get over three feet tall, and the ears are fairly small (topping out at about five inches), but it's sweet and wonderful and grows beautifully in our area.

I fully expect ripe ears by the end of August or early September.

This is the garlic. It's ready to harvest, and I'll probably pull it today or tomorrow.

I have sixteen tomato plants in smaller tires.

Nothing ripe yet, but lots of large green potential.

What Don doesn't eat fresh (he loves fresh tomatoes!), I'll strain and freeze, then make sauce and can it during the winter.

The carrots I let overwinter to form seeds are enormous, often tipping over from their sheer weight.

I've never let carrots go to seed before, and it's been fun to watch. The heads are thiiiiis close to being mature. One thing's for sure, the sheer volume of seed that comes from even one single carrot is enormous.

The strawberries are past their production, of course, and to be honest it's a relief.

Why? Because this year we harvested -- are you ready for this? -- a staggering 160 pounds of strawberries.

It was an enormous challenge to pick them all. Toward the end, we were practically running a you-pick for all the neighbors, inviting them to take what they wanted, the only requirement that I be allowed to weigh the fruit (for my seasonal tally) before they took it home.

Over the course of one month, we got 160 lbs. exactly (not counting what we snacked on as we picked). Everything we kept is washed and hulled and bagged up in the freezer, ready for strawberry desserts all winter long.

Meanwhile the experimental pineberries I planted last spring -- and subsequently nearly killed off when I forgot to water them during an early heat wave -- have branched out from the remaining plants and propagated across the tires. No fruit this year, but I'm encouraging them to send out every runner they can to populate the beds.

I grow several types of herbs. Here's sage:

Oregano:

Spearmint:

Horseradish:

(By the way the nice thing about tire gardening is I can grow stuff that spreads by roots, like mint and horseradish, without fearing it will take over the whole garden.)

Rosemary. Several of the herbs overwinter very well -- oregano, sage, horseradish, mint, thyme -- but I haven't had any luck with rosemary until this year. Sorta. You can't see it very well, but there's a small center plant that overwintered for the first time. The rest are store-bought. My mother used to grow enormous bushes of rosemary that got bigger and bigger every year, but what's possible in California isn't always possible in north Idaho.

Basil. I tucked basil in a couple of different beds, wherever there was room. This is growing with the spearmint:

And this is growing among some lettuce going to seed.

By the way, in this same bed is a heliotrope plant. I've always heard about the divine smell of heliotrope, and when I saw some plants on sale a couple months ago, I picked one up on impulse. Yep, it smells divine. A bit too strong for an indoor plant, but charming outdoors.

The raspberries are past their production, of course, but we picked and froze several gallons of berries.

The new blueberry bushes I planted last year are still in their growth phase. I got maybe a dozen berries from them (very sweet!), but they're healthy and strong and they'll start coming into their own in the next few years.

The mature blueberries gave me 18.5 lbs. of fruit this year, a nice haul.

But -- frustratingly -- I cannot control the weeds around these plants. Some readers might recall how I transplanted these long-suffering bushes from a very weedy spot five years ago, but unfortunately I also transplanted some very stubborn grasses that are spreading vegetatively.

Last year I dug up one of the bushes in winter and tried without success to tease out the blueberry's roots from the grasses. It was an utter failure, and all I did was kill the blueberry. After the newer bushes reach maturity, we'll probably take out this entire bed (saving what blueberry plants we can), tarp and gravel the ground, install a new bed, and replant. But that's several years in the future.

Red bell peppers. I bought these as seedlings. I have others I started in the house and they're also thriving, but I planted them late so I don't know if they'll produce.

However the store-bought seedlings have lots of peppers. These should start turning red shortly.

I won't be harvesting broccoli or Brussels sprouts, unfortunately.

That's because the broccoli has flea beetles.

Flea beetles are tiny jumping beetles that can turn a healthy plant into a lacy skeleton of its former self.

I'm going to try dusting the leaves with diatomaceous earth to see if it helps.

The Brussels sprouts, unfortunately, have aphids. I made some foul-smelling spray (water, soap, and chopped up onions, garlic, and hot peppers) to no avail; they're tucked into every nook and cranny.

I have lots and lots of lady bugs, too, but not enough to save the Brussels sprouts. Oh well, keep trying, little guys.

Aphids aren't the only thing tucked among the leaves. I saw this clever little fellow.

These are cayenne peppers. I have them planted in multiple beds.

A funny thing about the cayennes: last year I started an entire tray, 50 plants, in the house, but when I transplanted them, only 15 survived. We got a nice little harvest of peppers, but Younger Daughter goes through them pretty regularly. So this year I started 75 plants indoors in February. I transplanted about 60 of them and gave extras to neighbors. And what do you know? I didn't lose a single plant, so we're about to be buried in cayennes.

Onions. I'm growing two types. The first is just regular yellow onions grown from store-bought sets. These will be the first we'll eat, because they don't last long after harvesting (we don't have a root cellar). I have two beds of these onions.

This is the second bed. Notice the big honkin' volunteer potato plant in the middle of it. I have so many volunteer potatoes growing in so many different beds that I didn't bother planting any new potatoes.

The other type of onion I'm growing are potato onions (sometimes called multiplier onions). I had never heard of this variety before a reader brought them to my attention and kindly send me about a pound to plant. They're smaller than regular onions, but they store beautifully and have a nice bite. They're planted in the fall, like garlic, and right now they're about ready to harvest.

I'm tickled to death with these because before this, I couldn't propagate my own onions. Now, like the garlic, we can grow these ad infinitum. However since they're not as large as regular onions, we'll grow both types because larger onions are nice as slicers for sandwiches.

One of the beds of volunteer potatoes.

The second planting of peas are juuuust starting to emerge.

The grapes we planted earlier are doing well and starting to climb the trellis. No fruit this year, of course, but hopefully next year.

On a whim I also planted a single morning glory amidst the grapes, and it quickly became apparent why morning glories are considered a weed among crops -- they spread and twine onto everything, including the grapes.

I'll have to pull out the morning glory soon lest it strangle the grapes.

So how's our new baby orchard doing, you may ask? In a word, beautiful. Absolutely flippin' beautiful.

For those following our gardening journey, you might recall when we planted our baby orchard last May -- in gigantic tractor tires. This was entirely experimental and I do not know of anyone, anywhere, who has ever planted fruit trees in tires. But we've learned the hard way what happens when we plant directly in the ground.

Within each tire, at the base of all the trees, we planted wildflowers to help feed the bees. The flowers are blooming beautifully.

The trees are thriving so far. We planted two plums, and four each of peaches and apples. Here's one of the plums:

Of course we pinched off any fruit from these trees, especially for this first year, but we missed a plum and it's developing nicely.

Here's one of the apples:

I'm especially hopeful for the peaches, since peaches are, hands down, my all-time favorite fruit.

On each tire, I painted the type of tree it is, so I wouldn't forget or get them mixed up.

Meanwhile our mature pear tree -- one of two surviving pears from our original orchard attempt many years ago -- is bearing prolifically.

That's it for the garden tour. Ya'll come back now, hear?