Now that's an Idaho potato...

In the Garden

I decided to harvest my potatoes yesterday.  The potatoes were grown in the hay bales and we have been stealing some out of the bales as we needed them the past couple of months.  Last time I went in to take some, it seemed to me that some of them were starting to sprout.  So, even though the tops had not died back, I decided to harvest the potatoes.  I was pleasantly surprised!

Potato that is way bigger than my hand.

The good thing about the hay bale garden harvesting is how easy it was to do.  I just had to peel back pieces of the hay bale and grab the potatoes out.  No digging.  No accidentally stabbing potatoes with a fork.  No cutting them in half with a shovel. 
 

Potatoes growing in the hay bale.

 I had planted 3 bales and harvested a 5 gallon bucket of potatoes!  This doesn't count all the potatoes that we had eaten before I went in to "officially" harvest.

Another reason that I wanted to start harvesting them is because we are starting to make some raised beds and I needed a place to put them.  Henry made the frame and I put hardware cloth on the bottom.  It is a little hard to see but the bunch of plants at the end of the bed is the last of the potatoes.  As I harvested them out, I just threw the half rotted hay into the bottom of the new raised bed.

As I had noted in my garden post about a month ago, I almost gave up on even growing the potatoes in the bales.  It took me 3 tries to get them going.  I am SO glad I didn't give up on this!  I also have a 100 gallon potato bag.  I harvested that too.  I didn't even get enough potatoes to fill the bottom of the 5 gallon bucket.  From now on, it will be hay/straw bale potatoes for us!!!

Another note...I planted white and red potatoes.  I got maybe a total of 5 red potatoes.  For some reason, they just did not grow as well.  Maybe I planted more red potatoes in my first 2 failed attempts.  I really can't remember.  I will definitely be saving some of these white potatoes for planting next spring.  I also want to try some other varieties next year.  

Now, I am curing the potatoes and then I will store them.  Here is a great article on storing potatoes.

Next project, besides continuing with building the raised beds, is planting these overwintering onions that I started indoors last month...

~Denise

Video of herb/pollinator garden

In the Garden

Right outside my kitchen, I have planted an herb/pollinator garden.  I have my bee waterer located in here.  I took a quick video of the herb garden this morning...

I like how the herb garden is coming along.  I still have lots of room to plant more.  I am still working on getting shavings down over the hay and I will also put wood chips down on top of that.  I am going to try and dehydrate some more of the herbs this fall.  I have been able to dry some basil, oregano, parsley, sage, feverfew, chamomile, calendula, mint, and catnip thus far.  I want to look up some recipes for herbal teas to make this winter and use the herbs for these teas (and for cooking too).  Now that we are finished with the Farmer's Market for this year and the boys are going back to school, I should have time to focus on the drying.

Another thing that got put on the back burner was the compost piles/bins.  Finally this past week I was able to get in there and turn all of them.  I have 3 big open piles made out of pallets (actually, it is really 4 piles because I ran out of room and had to just dump some grass beside the pallets) and 3 covered bins up close to the house.  The more open piles had gotten pretty dried out and you need moisture for the microbes to do their job.  The great thing about compost is that you can just leave it and it will eventually work down but it goes faster if you can get in there and turn it.  I was able to harvest out 2 garbage cans full of compost!  In addition, I put a good 5 inches of compost in the blueberry raised beds and covered that with shavings.  That should really give the blueberries a boost.

Harvested compost in garbage can.

~Denise

Straw (hay) bale gardening

In the Garden

I would like to have lots of raised beds in the garden area.  However, it is expensive to purchase all the wood and hardware cloth.  So, I will probably just add a couple raised beds each year.

When we bought the property, there were a lot of old hay bales in the barns.  I decided to try and and do some straw bale gardening.

Let me back up a bit.  Last fall, I laid down cardboard and then put old straw on top of it where I wanted the garden area to be.  The idea was to kill the grass underneath.  At first, I just did one half of the garden.  Then, I decided to go ahead an do the rest.  Here is a picture of the garden area last fall. 

Here is a picture after I laid down all the cardboard and hay.  Also, I have the straw bales place here.  I have 5 rows of 4 bales on the left side and then 15 individual bales on the right side.

Then, in the spring, I figured out a way to get free wood chips delivered to my house from the electric company!

So, then I used the wheelbarrow to move wood chips on top of the hay.

I used the old hay bales we had but the method is really based on using straw bales.  There are advantages and disadvantages to each kind of bale.  It is more than just planting into straw bales.  You have to first condition the bales.  The idea is that you add a high nitrogen liquid fertilizer over several days at the beginning of the season to start decomposing the middle of the bale.  Then, you can plant into the top of the bale once it has cooled down.  I tried to plant some potatoes into one of the bales and then the next day I decided to check the temperature and it was 145 degrees!  So, I basically baked those taters.

It is easy to use a meat thermometer to monitor the inside temperature of the bale (which I should have done before I planted those potatoes).  Not only do you have to take note of the bale temperature but it has to be a certain daily temperature to get the bales to condition properly.  I tried to condition some bales the beginning of April and it did not work well.  It seems that daytime temperatures should be consistently around 50 degrees.

I actually had to re-plant the potatoes 3 times.  I was ready to totally give up on this method for potatoes but then they finally started to take off and they are super easy to harvest!  Love the straw bale gardening for potatoes and will use it in the future.  I also really liked the straw bale gardening for the tomatoes which got some many tomatoes that they fell over.  I am going to have to make a sturdier trellis next year.

I put some soaker hoses on the top of the bales for watering.

Here is a bale with broccoli and chamomile and basil (but it's hard to see the basil under the broccoli).

For the bales that I planted cucurbits in, I used these watering spikes...I planted 16 different cucurbits...mostly squash, cucumbers, and melons.

I am going to call the straw bale gardening mostly a success but there are some things that I think I would just rather plant into dirt.  The biggest drawback of the method to me is the surface area of the bale is so small.  I wish I would have put 2 bales side by side to make more area for planting.  The beets and onions did really well in the bales.  I think I would rather plant peppers, eggplants, broccoli and cauliflower in raised beds.

Here is a recent picture of the garden...

...and a video I made of a walk through of the garden...and a huge beet that I pulled out!

I am getting this blog out late because I spent the morning making pickled beets, kvass, and quick pickled beet stalks (the stalks are actually quite tasty!)

~ Denise

Rain water catchment system

In the Garden

I have the perfect set up for doing rainwater harvesting.  For some reason, there are multiple downspouts on our home and garage (probably our previous homes had this too but I just did not notice).  I have at least 4 places where I know there are downspouts that I can use to collect rainwater.  There are 3 downspouts located in the back of the home.  I consider the garden area "behind" the house so these are perfectly located.  The home/garage are situated "above" the garden area so we have gravity on our side back there.  

There is not as much slope to the front area of the home but I can still envision a way of collecting rainwater and diverting it down to an area where I want to put in a duck pond.  That is a project for next year...

Buying all these containers to catch the rainwater is going to be expensive.  I am hoping to maybe configure one system each year i.e. one downspout each year.  I remembered that we have a stock tank that we kept because it is in good condition.  We found it in a wooden box with insulation around it.

Stock tank hidden in wood box with insulation around it to keep it from freezing in the winter.

So, I started thinking that I could use this stock tank as a way to catch water for the garden until we can get a "real" catchment tank.

Here is a nice blog post about how someone else used a stock tank to catch rainwater.

I found this piece of metal in the barn and decided to use it for a "lid"

Henry help me put on a spout.

I bought a gutter diverter to put the rain water into the tank.

Then, I sat the lid on.

I then went to the Goodwill and bought a brown curtain and I draped it over the tank and secured it with bunge cords.  You don't want insects to be able to get in there so that is why I put a cloth cover over it too.

Here is the finished catchment system.

Anyway, it ain't pretty but it works!  It is a 100 gallon tank and it filled up 3 times in the spring.  I used it to water the asparagus and blueberries.  Of course, we haven't had any rain for a while so it will just sit there until the fall.

~Denise

Water for the bees...

Beekeeping

I don't think it is any secret that honeybee populations are on the decline worldwide.  Honeybees are useful pollinators and they give us honey!  Planting bee friendly flowers that bloom all spring, summer and autumn is one way to help the bees.  Another thing you can do is to put out a waterer for the bees.  All that flying around makes them thirsty!

Where I live, it gets very dry in the summer.  This little guy was trying to get a drink from our water feature that we have in front of the house.  BTW: the birds just LOVE this water feature and take baths there all the time.

Making a bee waterer is not hard at all.  Just use a very shallow pan and add marbles so that the bees have something to stand on while getting a drink...

I placed my bee waterer in my herb garden where I have herbs and flowers planted.  I see bees coming and going all day.  You will probably have to add water every day because you don't want the water too deep and it will evaporate. quickly when it's super hot. 

In this article, they floated wine corks in a bucket to make a bee waterer.  Here is another article about making a honeybee water garden...possibly a future project!

I went out back last week and looked at the old log where I saw wild honeybees last year.  I waited all spring to see if they would start flying out of there but nothing happened.  Well, it appears that a new group of bees have moved in (it could possibly be some that swarmed out of my own hive).  Anyway, the good news is that I saw honeybees flying in and out of the old log again!  Yeah!  

Then, I turned around and found a dead owl...ouch!  It really freaked me out.  Mostly just scared me because I was NOT expecting that.  I think it was one of the parent owls and not one of the babies.  

I am going to keep this blog post short because I just have like a hundred million things going on now that summer is in full gear!  I have been picking raspberries and I picked wild blackberries last Friday and made jam to take to the Farmer's Market.  Next weekend, we may go in search of huckleberries...

~Denise 

P.S. I should say that on July 14th, it marked 1 year since we signed the paperwork and bought our farm!  So, Happy 1st Anniversary to us!

2018 Spring update

On the Farm

At the end of each season, I am going to write up what we have been working on...mostly it has been planting and getting the garden area ready...

The past 3 months we have planted:
25 June bearing strawberries (10 went into my raised strawberry bed and the rest went into the food forest area) and 10 ever bearing strawberries
2 Pecan trees - none of these lived
2 Walnut trees - 1 of these seems to be growing from the base the other is dead
1 Almond tree - growing good
1 Chestnut tree - did not grow
1 Sugar maple tree
2 cannon firs and 1 Concolar fir (future Christmas trees)
8 blueberries
25 asparagus crowns
2 rhubarb (also got a couple transplants from a friend)
1 lemon tree - this is in a pot that will come inside in the winter
1 European Beech tree
2 Grapevines
1 black Elderberry
1 Service Berry
1 Pussy willow
1 Pear tree - also appears dead
2 Seaberries - these are not looking too good either...

Let's just say dozen's of herbs, flowers and vegetables...most gardening places have a 1 year guarantee on their plants so I have requested new nut trees to replace the ones that did not grow.  Now for some pics...

Asparagus crowns ready to be covered up

Baby asparagus...so cute!

Then, I posted this past week on Facebook that I heard in a podcast that you can plant strawberries among your asparagus.  So, I ripped out the 10 June bearing strawberries that I had started in their own little raised bed and transplanted them among the asparagus.  I didn't really care for the little raised bed that I had made for the strawberries and I was already planning on using a pallet to plant my strawberries in next year.  Actually, I probably will start a strawberry pallet next spring too.  Can't have too many strawberries! 

I had been to a "garden center" type place this week to replace one of the honeyberries that I planted last fall.  They had some ever bearing strawberries for sale so I bought 10 to put in the other asparagus bed (I have 2-12 foot long asparagus beds).  I just planted them down the middle...

A friend of mine had delivered to us a huge pile of oak leaves last fall.  I used most of them in the food forest area.  There was still a small pile of leaves left this spring once the snow melted away.  I started cleaning up the rest of the leaves and noticed several acorns.  So, I planted them...

...and 3 oak trees grew!  I did not include these in the tally above.  I will be putting them into their own pots and make sure they are growing good.  I will probably plant this this fall.

Grapevine that I am trying to trellis along a fence.

Went to Disneyland in March over spring break and had a great time!

Mark and Henry on ride at Disneyland.

Joshua and Henry at the beach in California

Henry, Mark, Denise and Joshua outside the Cars ride at Disneyland

Right after school was out, Denise and the boys went to visit family in Kansas and we brought back some blackberry bushes...

Now, I have to tell you the story behind these blackberries.  When Henry and I were first married, we lived in North Carolina and I planted these thornless blackberry plants.  Mark was a toddler and he would walk up and just pick the berries right off the plants and eat them.  He was often covered in purple blackberry juice...so cute!  

Anyway, my mom took a few starts back with her to Kansas one time when they came to visit us in NC.  Of course, the blackberries took over her garden!  After that, we moved to Florida and then to Idaho.  So, now I am going to be getting back some of the blackberries that I had like 14 years ago!

Transplanted blackberry starting to grow!

This is why people don't grow sweet potatoes this far north...LOL.  It got down to 38 degrees and they were frosted!  It is a little hard to see in this pic but 2 of them really did not have much damage.  So, I have marked them and I am going to save sweet potatoes from these to make slips next year.  I'm sure if these would have been covered, they would have probably been okay but this happened when I was away in Kansas.  I planted them in this old tractor tire because I thought it would be hotter for them in the black tire.  The good news is that about 90% of these have made a come back and are green again.

Frosted sweet potato plants.

Lastly, I just finished planting my sunflower seedlings yesterday...the slugs are still being problematic but over all, I think there will be a good amount of flowers...

...in fact, it looks like we might have our first bloom opening today!  I took this pic this morning!

I am scheduled to be at the Farmer's Market on Saturday...hopefully, we will be getting some more flowers opening.
~Denise

A Bucket of Bees!

Beekeeping

I knew it was going to happen...my bees swarmed!  I had seen the swarm cells.  Swarm cells are used to make a new queen.  A beehive makes swarm cells when the hive is too crowded.  The "old" queen takes off with worker bees to find a new place to build a hive.  Most of the bees will leave in the prime (or first) swarm.  Sometimes, there will be smaller afterswarms.  

This is how it all went down...I was out mowing and I noticed this swarm hanging onto a branch.  It was hanging very low, only about 4-5 feet off the ground.  As I had said previously, I knew this was going to happen because I had noticed the swarm cells in the hive. 

I should have split the hive but I have been so busy this spring with getting the garden ready, that I have not had time to stop and get a hive all put together.  Also, I was getting ready to go out of town and I figured if they swarmed while I was away, I wouldn't have a chance to get them anyway.  But, as luck would have it, I did see the swarm and I actually had a little free time that afternoon.  I called my friend, Alison, with the Moscow Bee Company.

Alison brought a nuc box and was able to capture the swarm.

Then, Mark's worker that I had brought out to see the swarm noticed another smaller swarm (afterswarm) up higher in the tree.  Alison had this fancy bucket that she used to capture that swarm...

Alison kept that swarm and I headed to Spence to get a langstroth hive for the swarm that she put into the nuc box.  I took out some of the frames and tried to "dump" out as many of the bees that I could.  Then, I just turned it upside down and left it for a little bit to allow the last of the bees to crawl down into their new home.

So, here it is...the new hive.  I went in to check in on it the next evening and I saw the queen in there.  I wasn't too worried but it was nice to see her.  

I will be keeping an eye on my top bar hive.  There are still lots of bees in there but I am also excited to try a new type of beekeeping in the langstroth hive.
~Denise