Tag: Garden

Starting Your Fall Garden In Zone 8b
Gardening · Homesteading · Urban Homesteading

Starting Your Fall Garden In Zone 8b

Sarah

It’s second week of July and most people are not thinking about their fall garden. They are focused on what is happening now, and the start of the summer harvest. But now is the time to get your fall crops seeded and going, so you can get them in the ground in the months of July and August.

And yes, it always coincides with the heat, but if you want to eat for extended months, this is the time. Work in the cool morning or as the sun sets (if you don’t have mosquitoes). I love the evening as the bats come out and fly over us—eating those mosquitoes!

There is a wide amount of produce you can plant soon to extend your garden by 2 months on average. Our growing area has a 10% chance of frost around October 23rd, and by then, the sun will be getting weaker in the northwest, and the hours of light will start to get shorter, so it will be about time to wrap it up for fall. If you think about it, many gardeners give up around Labor Day, losing 1¾ months of potential crops.

Having frost fabric on hand is vital, just in case you need it. Depending on the year, a killing frost can sneak up earlier. See here for an article on how to prep for frost.

Need seeds for fall?

Sow Right Seeds has fall seeds ready to ship and to get started. Use code “SARAHK10” for 10% off. They offer collections of seeds, one of which is the “Fall Crop,” as seen above.

What can you plant in Zone 8b?

Arugula:

Seed Start 8/6-13 Outdoor Planting 9/03

Bush Bean:

Outdoor Seeding 8/19

Beet:

Seed Start 7/27-8/3 Outdoor Planting 8/24

Broccoli:

Seed Start 7/17-24 Outdoor Planting 8/14

Carrots:

Outdoor Seeding 8/04

Kale:

Seed Start 7/22-29 Outdoor Planting 8/19

Kohlrabi:

Seed Start 7/27-8/03 Outdoor Planting 8/24

Lettuce:

Seed Start 7/27-8/03 Outdoor Planting 8/24

Mustard Greens:

7/19-8/02 Outdoor Planting 9/13

Pak Choi (Bok Choy):

Outdoor Seeding 8/24

Bush Peas:

Plant anytime from now on to the end of July. Do not plant pole peas, as they take too long to grow.

Radishes:

Outdoor Seeding 8/24

Spinach:

Seed Start 8/11-18 Outdoor Planting 9/08

Summer Squash:

Seed Start 7/17-24 Outdoor Planting 8/14

Swiss Chard:

Seed Start 8/03-10 Outdoor Planting 8/24

Turnips:

Outdoor Seeding 8/24

Zucchini:

Outdoor Seeding 8/24

So you don’t live in Grow Zone 8b?

Want some help on when to seed and plant? Check out Sow Right Seed’s Planting Calculator – just enter your zip code, and you can choose from Spring or Fall planting. It’s that simple!

You can also play with the chance of frost. I put in the lowest chance, which is 10%; you might want to go up higher. It’s always good to go and look at all the options and see how dates change.

~Sarah

Building A Food Forest With Edible Perennials
Gardening · Homesteading

Building A Food Forest With Edible Perennials

Sarah

One of our long-term goals on our homestead has been building densely planted food forests, where most are perennial. Planting once and eating every year has been my goal for long-term sustainability.

While we have carved out garden beds to grow in (because of deer) that are fenced, 2 of the biggest beds grow wild now. Yes, I do weed to a certain point and water in the hottest weeks still, but it is every year getting to where I need to maintain it less. Just prune as needed and fertilize yearly.

Less work is the goal, with the promise of food to come.

These beds are The Orchard, Berry Bed, and The Strawberry walk-in cage.

What do we grow?

We have planted these plants over the past five years, and most have survived. I have noted what grows well in our area.

Of course, your mileage may vary depending on what grows in your microclimate. This may mean you lose plants here and there, but that is part of the learning.

Berries:

Strawberries, native strawberries, alpine strawberries.

Blueberries. We currently have about ten varieties to avoid a mono-crop.

Raspberries, golden raspberries, marionberries, blackberries. (Multiple varieties)

Kiwi Berries.

Grapes. (Multiple varieties)

Gooseberry.

Lingonberry.

Fruit and Nut Trees:

Plum, peach (frost type), apples, and pears have all done well.

Figs (cold hardy).

Olives (cold hardy, grow at last 2)).

Elderberry (at least 2)

Asparagus:

I keep growing more from seed every year; in the second to third year, you can transplant it into the ground. Once established, it lives on its own. Cutting it often encourages new growth.

Rhubarb:

When we moved rural, I quaintly thought I needed 15 plants. One or two is just fine. But do plant it; it’s a pretty plant. It’ll need water for the first few years and pruning of dying-back leaves, which encourages new growth all season.

Artichokes:

Grow as many as you can. Whether or not you eat them or let them go to flower, they are beautiful and tall. Native bees love the flowers.

Herbs:

Unless you live where it is snow-covered or deep freezes for months, many herbs come back yearly, especially culinary ones. Once they are established, a good trim/pruning and annual fertilizing are usually all you need to do. You may lose one or two if there is an extreme freeze. Otherwise, watering is often only needed first year and during heat waves in summer.

Potatoes:

Once planted, potatoes love to hide baby potatoes you miss in harvesting. They love to come back on their own.

Also, if you harvest damaged potatoes, toss them back in the ground to grow a new crop, even if they are rotten or have insect damage.

Garlic (sometimes):

Garlic can rip when pulled out and will come back up again the next year if cloves are left behind. Letting hard-neck garlic go to flower will produce garlic bulblets that will seed it naturally. (This happened to us last year in an outlying field that is full of feral garlic now.)

Letting Native Plants Take Root:

Evergreen Huckleberry.

Red Huckleberry.

Thimbleberry.

Salal.

Salmonberry.

~Sarah

Never Stop Chasing New Ideas
Gardening · Homesteading

Never Stop Chasing New Ideas

Sarah

A few weeks back, a long-time permaculture instructor gave a free talk on the island. She has decades of experience, and why wouldn’t we want to explore it? It was enough that after attending the discussion, I attended the first two days of her 2-week long permaculture certification class. Taking the entire class wasn’t within my realm for now, but the first two days were where the basics of permaculture were opened up to us. She graciously opened it up to people wanting to take day one and day two before they delved into the deep part and started working on an actual site assessment to earn their certifications.

The biggest takeaway is that, intuitively, we have been practicing permaculture without realizing it on our land. We are repairing the forest, balancing nature, and filling our land with animals and pollinators. Even how we grow food reflects this. There is a huge difference between how we grew food in our last two homes and how we grow food on the land here. My goal has always been to have a food forest with many layers connected in their own way. When the land is bare and open, it is hard to envision it. Even in winter, it is hard to see. But as spring passes into early summer, watching it all come together, my happiness increases rapidly as the plants grow, covering everything.

Knowing we had been doing the right thing all along was a feeling of happiness. Allowing the land to practice rewilding in areas was positive. It was letting the land “garden” itself reclaiming how it should be naturally.

But it opened my eyes to what we could also be doing. And I came out very inspired.

The other huge takeaway for me was working with zones.

And I realized that for our land, we do have issues.

For a while, we had Zone 1 in the first two years here; as we opened up the land in Zone 2, I turned my back on Zone 1. Zone 1 needs so much love. It needs to be used more to have more “kitchen garden” space so that we can walk out and have food easily to harvest, which can be used within minutes of harvesting.

But it also made me realize that Zones 1 and 2 are disjointed. They need to be better connected.

Zone 2 sits 1-2 acres below our home, which is Zone 1. To walk there, one has to take the driveway. If the land is wet or hot, one is less likely to want to go down for extended periods. Walking outside the house and just being there is sustainable. Again, it opens the mind to think and dream of what we can do. We have plenty of Zone 3, 4, and 5. But we need more use of Zone 1. Be it a small greenhouse that encourages me to grow more citrus in winter and more raised beds out the doors to fanciful projects like an herbal spiral, I came out inspired to start planning.

Just dipping our toes into permaculture was well worth it.

~Sarah

Two Easy Garden Hacks To Keep You Organized
Gardening · Homesteading · Urban Homesteading

Two Easy Garden Hacks To Keep You Organized

Sarah

Anytime I can make my life easier when working in our gardens, so much the better. Call them gardening hacks, if you will.

The first one has been in my possession for at least 8 years, and it still functions well.

The used plastic coffee container:

I got the tub for free, used. Washed with soap and left open for a while, the coffee smell dissipated quickly. Just ask on Facebook if any family or friends use these, and “can you save me your next empty one?”. Pople love not having to toss stuff in the garbage can.

With its tight-fitting lid, I usually use it to store my plant ID tags and Sharpie markers. If I am working on seeding but need to take a break, I will also tuck seeds in it.

It’s watertight, and eight years out, no animals or rodents have bothered it. I primarily store it in my greenhouse, but it’s been left out in the potting station, even in the rain.

These coffee containers are great for storing small items such as irrigation parts, clips, rolls of twine, and more. Keeps items clean, not dusty, and away from UV damage. This is also helpful if you do not have a shed or greenhouse to store items in; the tub can be stashed under a potting table.

The Grow Bag Second Use:

A week or so back, I saw a great deal on 10-gallon-sized grow bags ($12.49 for ten of them, meaning $1.25 each!) (They are normally $31.99 for the set, so $3.20 each). We bought two sets because you never know when you might need them. I have used multiple of them to plant bell pepper plants, so they are getting used.

But it struck me that they’d also work well for stashing weeds in.

This ended up being better than using them to plant in.

They fit between my rows in the beds and have a wide, flat bottom. I find the bags easier to use than 5-gallon buckets, and the wide handles make picking it up a snap.

I price compared to the same size bags sold locally. $7.99 a bag! Shopping online and watching sales can go far in affording more gardening gear. And also cheaper than buying new 5 gallon buckets, but more so, once done using, they flatten up for easy storage.

~Sarah

Gardening: Getting The Tomatoes and Peppers In The Ground
Gardening · Homesteading · Urban Homesteading

Gardening: Getting The Tomatoes and Peppers In The Ground

Sarah

In theory, Mother’s Day Weekend is the typical tomato and pepper planting time in the Pacific Northwest. That depends on the weather, of course, but by then, we have passed the last frost date weeks before.

This year has been special. For being in a “drought,” it’s been cool and rainy this May. Today, as the Memorial Day Weekend starts, it is slated to rain much of the day, and the other day, we got nearly an inch of rain. The plants have liked it, so who am I to complain? Maybe a bit warmer would be nice, but I’ll take the cool weather in the mid to upper 50s for now. Soon enough, the sun will get hot. Honestly, the wind coming up the Salish Sea on our island can do the worst damage; it taxes the plants when that happens. And finally the wind has tapered back.

Years ago, I stopped growing tomato plants under grow lights. I had a couple of reasons why, and the biggest was that when we moved to our homestead here, I did not have electricity to the greenhouse, as I had at our previous place. Then I noticed my plants were stronger and denser and barely needed hardening off time before planting. After that, I didn’t look back. I found that I had to start bell and hot pepper plants from the starts I’d bought, as pepper seeds seem to really need the lights. I was OK with that “cheating”. 11 to 15 pepper plants are plenty for us anyway. On average, I grow about 150 tomato plants and plant around 120 in the ground (or dwarf plants, into large pots).

The other is I quit worrying about when I planted my tomato seeds. When I first started, I was a January seeder. Then, I did a test grow for a known seed company that sent seeds out across the USA to see how they grew. I got those seeds in early April. I planted them, and at the end of summer, those plants were exactly the same size and producing heavily compared to the early seeded ones. Tomatoes didn’t need the early start as peppers did.

So I quit worrying. I started seeding tomatoes in March. In the PNW we don’t have enough light to grow until March, when the sun begins to return, with the spring equinox.

Earlier in the season. As the seeds sprout and start to grow, I pot them up into gallon pots, and let them grow int he unheated greenhouse. The biggest ones go to the left, where they get the most sun. Those will always be the first to be set out to plant.

From big to small.

Peppers growing.

By May, though, at least 50 tomatoes are usually getting too big. The greenhouse can reach 120° on a sunny day in the mid-60s. This leads to plants I must water 2x a day, as the soil dries out quickly.

The first blooms will start happening as well.

And yuck, aphids on one pepper plant. That’s definitely time to kick them out and stop an infestation in the greenhouse.

The peppers and dwarf tomatoes go into 5-gallon buckets and other large pots filled with well-aged compost.

50 tomato plants or so went out of the greenhouse to get fully hardened off. These were the biggest plants.

The bed I am using this year was cut in the summer of 2018, the first growing area I built when we moved here. It has changed over the years in size and how I do rows. This fall we are going to deep till it, remove yet more rocks, then put down a silage tarp. It has a lot of weed issues, being so close to the edge of the woods. It was nothing but weeds after this past winter. I put myself to it, and kept digging weeds. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Tomatoes don’t mind weeds, really.

My idea this year was to suppress the weeds on the edges, using a roll of low-grade yard fabric I had on hand. On that I placed all the pots.

Then I started the first of 3 rows of tomatoes.

I grow field style, using cages. Yes, I could do them under cover, but it isn’t an issue to me. Once summer is here, it will be a thick jungle of tomatoes. I also tend to grow shorter plants as I like smaller tomatoes.

First row mostly done. I found a roll of farm fabric, and cut it in half, forming pathways to walk on. Normally, you’d burn holes in the fabric to put the plants through, to suppress weeds. But I had other ideas. It’s to just get me through these months, so I can fully change the bed.

Second row in, with another walk way.

I then moved out the rest of the tomatoes to let them finish growing/hardening outside. I am slowly planting the third row; as I feel the plants are ready, I put a couple in the ground. The last 30 were last seeded, so will take extra time.

Some of the tomatoes were definitely taxed by getting too big in the greenhouse. They needed a good dose of fertilizer and water (these plants were getting root-bound). This is a real issue if you have to wait 2-3 weeks longer to plant outside because it is still too cold. In the greenhouse, it is summer. All the watering drains them of nutrients.

In the coming week, it is supposed to finally be warmer and sunnier, so the plants will double in size. We are sitting at just over 15½ hours of sunlight, with another hour to gain, before the Summer Solstice in late June.

~Sarah