Project Pics

We got lots of stuff done around the place this past weekend. We planted zucchini, parsley, basil, and something else - maybe coriander? I can't remember - Dianne is that right?

We ran soaker hoses along each of five rows in the big garden:

We spread about 2 cubic yards of mulch in various beds:

And we got a new garden patch started that will hopefully be home to watermellon, cantaloupe, pumpkins, and possibly some potatos:

I did a full post on Gardenaut that covers how we got this new bed started. It should be published in a couple days. It was a busy weekend around the place. We also got the lawn mowed, which is kind of a big job. Place sure does look better with a haircut.

Oh yeah, we also put in new stepping stones - that Dianne and Mr. O made - by the chicken coop door:

Strawberry Update

Lots of activity on the farm this weekend but I don't have lots of time to write about it. Thought I'd post a quick strawberry update. With the exception of one plant in one of the beds the plants in all three beds are doing well.

Here's one with a blossom on it. Most of the plants are starting to put on buds. We're supposed to pick these off the first year to encourage the plant to focus on establishing a strong root system, but it's going to be hard not to let some of the blossoms go and hopefully turn into strawberries.

It's strawberry season here in Central NC. Mr. O is a strawberry fiend. We picked up a basket full at the farmer's market this weekend and he has been plowing through them. We found one berry in our basket with a particularly large nose.

Getting the Garden Going

We're a little behind on the garden so far, but we've started to get some things in the ground. We've got 18 tomato seedlings we bought at the Raleigh farmer's market (very close to our house) and they're ready to go in. We also have 13 or so tomato seedlings that we got from our friend Jon, who started them from seed. (Jon - they're looking a little spindly - hopefully they'll perk up). Included in this group are some neat varieties with some unusual colors - I'm really looking forward to seeing how these do.


So what do we have in the garden? Well we got pepper seedlings in - I think the variety is called Red Beauty and they also came from the farmer's market. 18 of those. We've also planted pickling and regular cuke seeds as well as sugar snap peas, yard long beans, green beans (not sure the variety). We put some snow pea seeds in the ground too - probably too late in the year to do that but we'll see what happens.

The cukes, peas, and beans will grow up the trellises you see in the left side of this picture, the peppers will be next to them, then zucchini, and then two rows of tomatos. Note the headless scarecrow - extra scary. You can barely see it in this picture but I use a string between two stakes to lay out my planting rows. Some may find this a little anal - but I like my rows to be fairly straight. I saw Eliot Coleman use this technique on the gardening show that he and his wife Barbara Damrosch used to have. That was a great show - wish it was still on.


Our tomato cages are made from field fencing. We have an extra roll around for making fence repairs and I figured it would work well for tomato cages. I snip the bottom horizontal strand of wire off each cage which allows 6 or 7 vertical wire pieces to penetrate the ground about 5-6 inches. This keeps the cages from toppling over in a heavy wind.


What else are we doing around here . . . .? Well, the strawberries need mulching, the hops are doing well, we cleaned out the chicken coop for the first time. This took a little longer than I anticipated. I'm thinking maybe we need to invest in one of those big-wheeled garden carts - those things are cool. The wheelbarrow is good for hauling really heavy stuff, but a garden cart could hold more light, loose material like the old straw from the coop. We also planted Verbena around the coop to spruce it up a bit. We're planning to do a good bit of mulching around existing and new flower beds this weekend - maybe get some horse manure too if my source comes through.

Finally, I'm writing for another blog called Gardenaut as a contributing gardener. My first post was posted 4/17/08. Check it out.

Something’s Brewing at Sourwood Farm

Ok, something was brewed and is now fermenting – bubbling happily away as we speak (um, or read or type or something). I figure that homebrewing fits into our suburban homesteading – producing something that is normally bought at a store. And let me tell you, our local grocery has a terrible selection of beer! So, we benefit in two ways from our homebrewing efforts – one, it is cheaper than purchasing commercial beer and two, we have an unlimited selection to choose from.

While I would love to be able to produce the ingredients needed for brewing, the only thing really practical is to grow hops. We have an arbor over both of our gates and we planted some hops at the base of the larger one two years ago. One side did not make it at all and the other side came up meekly/weakly and fizzled out. The drought has not helped but that side is up this year and looking strong. We also got two additional rhiozomes from our friend S (best neighbor ever) this weekend for the other side. Hopefully we can keep them nicely watered from the rain barrels this summer but tomatoes come first. I am willing to sacrifice the hops for homegrown tomatoes. The variety of hops that we are growing is Cascade, my favorite.

My homebrewing efforts started about ten years ago when S dug her equipment out of storage and showed me the ropes. I was hooked immediately! Every batch has been drinkable. Sure, some have been better than others but over the years, I have refined my techniques and processes so I’m turning out some fairly consistent and tasty beers (so they tell me). I also have narrowed the field down to several go-to recipes that are our favorites.

Right now we are drinking a pale ale that I would have to say is our all-time favorite. Nice and hoppy but not overly challenging, easy to drink but still very interesting.

So, the brewing, right. I brewed a lemon wheat this weekend. I love this ale in the summer. Don’t let the lemon scare you off – it is there but just enough to be slightly refreshing and light. I think it goes well with the wheat.Hopefully next weekend I can get this wheat bottled and get another batch brewed (an ESB). This flurry of brewing is more than my usual batch every several months or so but I’ve been tasked (happily accepted) with having some beers ready for our camping trip to the Bass Mountain Bluegrass Festival at the end of May. That’s ambitious for my schedule of brewing and waiting FOREVER to actually bottle but I think I’m up to the task. We also need to get the garden in sometime too. Busy days here at Sourwood!

Spinach . . . . . . finally

After many, many tries we were finally able to have a real spinach harvest yesterday. Not sure why but until now we have had no luck with spinach. We've tried growing it in several locations and have never had any results to speak of. In fact the stuff that we harvested yesterday was actually planted last fall. It sprouted and put on a couple leaves and then just seemed to go to sleep. We let it be over the winter and now that spring is here it actually grew with little to no attention - so that's what easy to grow means.

My theory on why the plants went sort of dormant last fall is that the day length was getting too short and the sun was too low in the sky for the plants to get much sun. We have an acre or more of our property cleared so getting enough sun isn't usually a problem in the spring and summer. The cleared part of our property is surrounded by tall pines and poplars, so as the days were getting shorter and the angle of the sun was lower I think the spinach wasn't getting enough sun to thrive. The fact that the spinach lived through the winter tells you how mild our winter was - I think we only saw snowflakes once.

The other green stuff in the picture is garlic and shallots. We planted those last fall too but I think they're supposed to go through the winter and then come up the following spring. Dianne tells me that they won't be ready for harvest until their foliage dies back and then they may take some curing after that. You can see I'm not the garlic and shallots expert in the family.

Here's a shot of Mr. O doing some serious spinach picking - that one sure did have some long roots. We enjoyed fresh homegrown spinach in our salads last night and with every bite I savored the gobs of nutrition coursing through my digestive system and finding their way to wherever vitamins and minerals go. It reminded me of the School-House Rock tune "The Body Machine", which I only heard 80 bazillion times this weekend as we drove to Northern, VA and back. That CD is one of Mr. O's favorites. I have to admit I learned a lot from those as a kid. Check out the tune and video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVAvxGDjlpM .

Surecrop Strawberries

It didn't feel much like spring this past Saturday. We had wind, rain, and highs in the mid to low 40's. We muddled through nonetheless and got our Strawberries planted. We ordered a variety called Surecrop. I think we ordered ours from Burpee but their website no longer has a description of this variety - I think they may have sold out. Miller Nurseries has a decent description of Surecrop.

We decided to go with a June bearing variety as opposed to an ever-bearing on the advice of Dianne's mom who is a graduate of Virginia's Master Gardener program. Her experience with ever-bearers was that you never got a big enough crop at one time to do much with the fruits other than just eat them. So we went with a June bearer hoping to get a crop that we can use for preserves. Of course there will be the inevitable crop losses when Mr. O is helping us pick. He loves him some strawberries.

We ordered 25 plants and they came as mostly roots. We trimmed the roots to 3" as the planting instructions noted and then buried the plants up to the crown making sure that the crowns were level with top of soil. Strawberries like a loose sandy soil with lots of organic matter. We have none of that in our native soil so we planted them in three different raised beds that we filled with a mixture of either horse manure and loamy topsoil or compost and topsoil. By the way the leafy green stuff on the right side of this picture is a hop plant that we hope will one day grow up and over the arbor in the picture. It dies back every year and then sprouts anew from a rhizome, so it's just getting started this year.

We spaced the strawberries pretty far apart in the raised beds. Like their wild strawberry cousins these cultivated plants send out runners that start new plants. So eventually our raised beds should be covered with a mat of strawberry plants. Wonder how long that will take. Our planting instructions advised picking off all the blossoms this first year to enable strong root growth. I think we'll adhere to that for the most part, but we might have to let a few go just to see and taste a couple homegrown strawberries.

Chicken update: Winnie and Coco are laying regular now. I was a bit worried about Coco a week ago because I had seen her on the nest twice but she hadn't layed anything. She got interrupted on Easter as we had guests over who wanted to check out the chickens - man did she put up a racket about that. She popped out of the hen house telling us off in clucks and squawks. A day or so later she finally layed. We've had a couple two egg days over the past four or five days so I think she got over it. Sure was fun dying (and eating) our homegrown eggs for easter.