Tag: Gardening

Invest January Into Next Year’s Garden
Gardening · Homesteading · Urban Homesteading

Invest January Into Next Year’s Garden

Sarah

Christmas Day is for me the start of the next year’s gardening season.

And I’ve often thought that for many it is the same.

After everyone goes home, or you make your escape back home….there is something about the desire and pull to become more simple in our lives. To stop and just be for awhile. The frantic build up to the holidays is fraying on the nerves, as is the loud music and the push to “buy, buy buy!” A cup of hot herbal tea, a comfy chair, and a pile of seed catalogs can reverse that feeling.

Time to think on what I want to change in the coming year. What I want to grow. What I want to try.

Btw, Chamomile tea is my choice, with a touch of lemon juice for that Vitamin C we need, and a pinch of Stevia for sweetness.

But I digress, that last week of December slips by. And suddenly it is January. And if it is like it is here, winter is about to make its showtime. This is the prediction for this current week. We have had a mild winter so far, so this is needed. Cold hours are miserable, but make plants grow better come spring.

Make lists. Make charts. Doodle drawings of how you would like things. If you must get items do it now so you can watch prices.

I got a new gift for myself to use in the garden:

A Hori Hori Japanese weeding knife. Amazon had a great sale on them awhile back and I snagged it.

A month back I planted hardy lettuce. It is growing slowly. We are still at around 8.5 hours of daylight so it won’t grow big for another 2 months. But I am testing it to see how it fares through a freeze in the winter, although in the greenhouse.

Our Meyer Lemons are approaching being ripe.

A few more weeks and they will go to an orange color. They ripened into yellow this past week.

With the potential of a freeze cycle, I covered the citrus trees in frost fabric. It can give an extra 10 to 15* degrees protection.

If there is a project for January? It is get your garden ready to go. Work on the inside things first.

For example, most of the shelves in our greenhouse are covered in trays, full of 4″ pots filled with potting soil. While they are seedless, they are ready to go at the end of the month, when it is time to start seeding and into February. This is a boring job to do, so I did it when there wasn’t anything pulling me away. And working in the greenhouse is pleasant when it is cold outside.

So yes, I work outside but I also know…it’s OK to just plan!

~Sarah

Why Do Bell Peppers Have Babies Inside?
Gardening

Why Do Bell Peppers Have Babies Inside?

Sarah

Here’s a great produce question:

Have you ever cut into a bell pepper, only to find a baby bell pepper inside, often covered in seeds? Or weird stalagmite growths inside that look like they might someday be a pepper?

This is called Internal Proliferation, and is naturally occurring. The little pepper inside the bell pepper is the sign of a ripe, or especially an overripe bell pepper. Its form can vary from irregular, and contorted, to a near-perfect (like how mine appears) but it is sterile fruit. A pepper growing inside a pepper is a type of parthenocarpy, which is the formation of fruits without outside fertilization or the formation of seeds inside it. Now then, you might well see the mini pepper covered in the seeds of the mama pepper. You can pull the seeds off and discard them.

Is the pepper edible? Yes, it is! It should taste the same.

Why does it happen?

You will see this primarily in over ripe produce.

I have been seeing more of them this fall, and my thoughts is they are selling peppers that years ago were sold to food processors instead (like for salsa as an example). I was processing 8 bell peppers today and 3 had mini peppers, a couple more had the start of it. All the peppers were very ripe. Like if I had let them sit another day, the chickens would have had some to eat.

While this doesn’t happen often in home grown bell peppers (because it can take so long to get peppers to grow in the cold PNW), if you live in a hot area, or are using a greenhouse to grow them, you can see it. It is seen far more often in field/greenhouse grown peppers from Mexico (the huge shiny ones sold in the north are grown hydroponically in greenhouses or under grow lights in British Columbia).

This year’s El Nino weather brings many growing issues in Mexico and further south, and the start of the growing season hasn’t been kind to these areas (Peru has seen horrible blueberry crops for weeks already). It does lead to one wondering are they being sold because there simply isn’t enough crop to be picky?

Just thoughts.

But they are perfectly fine to eat. Enjoy it when you see them!

~Sarah

A Seedling Became A Tree
Gardening · Homesteading

A Seedling Became A Tree

Sarah

One of the best parts of gardening is how it shifts over the years. I’ve done basic gardening, I’ve run an urban farm, built a homestead garden out of raw land, and I have grown a lot of plants. For both us and to sell, trade, and to give away. I used to grow hundreds of rare strawberry plants and herbs that were not common. It was a passion those years, where selling supported the cost of it all. I still grow the unusual, but at a slower rate these days. It’s less about selling now, and more about wanting to cover our land with beneficial plants. That is the “feeling” I have for the 2024 grow season.

But I also started seeing things differently. In so many ways it is similar to making yeast bread. Where one must have patience it will happen.

It just takes a couple of years to see the first results.

The long games can be easy to forget about. This one stuck with me, and since that first year, I have started many other trees.  Douglas Fir and Big Leaf Maple have joined this tiny Western Cedar.

I had looked down and seen a tiny seedling in 2020, growing in a retaining wall. It had to come out, but this one talked to me. To not waste its energy. So I plucked it out carefully, and potted it up.

Trees are simple: They either make it or they don’t. It’s that simple for growing them. Give them good soil, water and light. And protected from deer that will eat the gentle soft starts.

So I planted it in acidic soil, in a 1 gallon pot and ignored it. It got watered and plenty of sun. But I did nothing else.

Eventually I looked at it 2021 and realized it needed to be upsized.

So I moved it up to a 5 gallon pot.

The trees live behind fences, in the berry bed.

It’s now entering the soon-to-be-winter of 2023. It’s tall now.

Our youngest, bent over in the sun. He is over 5’3″ now and the tree is taller than him. Soon the tree will be taller than the fence.

It makes me happy to watch this tree grow.

It is surrounded by the other trees we are growing.

Growing a legacy tree is a pretty cool thing to do. Take a tiny seedling that most likely won’t make it, and give it a chance.

This coming spring we will get these all in the ground, and watch them grow. Now big enough that they can survive the deer.

And one day, they may well be a gentle giant, towering over little starts.

And if that is my legacy, it’s good enough for me.

~Sarah

Sow Right Seeds Black Friday Sale
Gardening · Homesteading · Urban Homesteading

Sow Right Seeds Black Friday Sale

Sarah

I have been watching all the good sales coming up this week for us homesteaders – and a sale on seeds is always a good one! I love Sow Right Seeds. They are fairly priced and grow well (yes, I am a customer!)

November 21st to December 2nd Sow Right Seeds is having a sale on:

All Garden Kits & Microgreens Kits are 15% off.

Have you grown microgreens? It’s really easy. And you can do it in a sunny window, even in winter. It’s a great nutritional blast of greens in your diet.

Garden Kits are a fun treat for yourself, but also make a great gift to someone just starting out (and children as well!)

Single Packets Mix & Match 25% off when you purchase 10 packets or more. I always buy early, so I get the best choice in the past few years. The seeds are here for 2024, so start planning and buying!

Seed packets make great stocking stuffers for your fellow gardeners & homesteaders.

Sow Right Seeds is the link, which also gets you 5% off on top of the sales. You can enter the code “SARAHK10” as well for 10% off. Orders over $25 ship free in the US as well!

FTC Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. But a good sale is too good to keep to myself!

~Sarah

Updated USDA Growing Zones – Impacts on your homestead and garden
Gardening · Homesteading · Urban Homesteading

Updated USDA Growing Zones – Impacts on your homestead and garden

Sarah

The USDA just released an updated Plant Hardiness Zone Map, or otherwise known as the growing zones for the United States, for 2023.

For some areas of the United States there has been a shift in what zone you might be in now. And it is most likely warmer in winter.

While where I live hasn’t shifted, the areas directly around us have. Where we used to live, in inland Western Washington, has now become 8b. It was previously 8a to 7b. That is a huge change for low temperatures. What used to be 5* in winter storms might be 15*.

It can mean fewer bugs die in winter and more pest pressure on your crops. It also means more stress on forests, leading to more forest fires every year. Since we moved back to Whidbey Island, there hasn’t been a summer that wasn’t smoke-choked in August and September as it rolled down from the mountains across the water or down from B.C., Canada.

It also means for some zones you will be able to grow different items, but also might get where you cannot grow your favorites, and you must seek out new varieties, bred to handle more heat.

It’s a lot to ponder but also good knowledge to have on hand.

~Sarah