2009 Varieties - Part I - High Mowing Seeds

It is snowing again today and about 25 F (-3.9 C) degrees. It is not major snow, about 3 - 4" (8 cm) so far, but I think this is already been the fourth of fifth snow of this year which is a lot more than it has the last several years. We've spent most of the day in the house reading, drawing manga, and playing Wii, but I've also been using the time to plan out the garden.

High Mowing Seeds is an organic seed company located in Vermont. I buy about half of my seeds there, this is the second year I've used them and I am overall happy with the experience. The selection is good, their website is friendly and easy to use and their customer service is quick and helpful. They also offer a variety of other garden related items such as plastic mulch, inoculant, and compost (I got their hat last year and wear all the time). In addition to vegetables, they also have several cover crops and flower varieties.

Here is what I got from High Mowing this year. This will make up about half of the 2009 varieties I will be planting.

Beans

Kentucky Wonder
Rattlesnake Pole
Shirofumi Edamame

Cucumber

Suyo Long
National Pickling
Marketmore

Peas

Sugar Ann

Carrots

Yaya F1
Red Cored Chantenay

Squash

Yellow Crookneck

Sunflowers

Jerusalem Sunrise Lemon
Mammoth


Snow falling in the backyard:

Finding Farm Fresh Close To Home

Change happens slowly over time and it is hardly noticed. Tomatoes, corn and other vegetables at the supermarket take on a bland homogenized taste over time as they are bred for characteristics that make them better at being shipped than eaten. Eventually we take it for granted that fruits and vegetables have no flavor.

The first summer after we moved out of Jersey City, we found a local farm stand and were shocked at how rich and flavorful the fresh Jersey corn and tomatoes were. It became common for us to drive around with an eye out for a new farm stand and it became the norm to supplement what was being grown in the backyard with the flavorful produce of the farm stand.

http://www.localharvest.org/ is a great site which allows you to find farm stands in your area, the products that they sell and the seasons they offer them. Chances are you will be surprised at how many of them are within a short distance from your home and you have maybe even regularly driving past them without even realizing it.

In addition to the farm stands, search for the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms in your area as well. In a CSA, all the members pay an up front fee in exchange for a regular share of the farms harvest. This share usually consists of a weekly basket of whatever is fresh and in season at the farm which is often delivered to a convenient pick up point. It is a convenient way to ensure a steady supply of fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the growing season as well as an opportunity to try new varieties you would not normally find at the supermarket.

We've joined the Mountain Lakes Organic Vegetable Coop and have been getting a weekly basket of organics. The price is reasonable, the taste is better and about once every six weeks or so there is a variety in the basket that we might not have thought to try otherwise.

Making A Rain Barrel

Back in the 1970's, my grandfather had a simple rain barrel connected to the gutters on his house which he would use to collect water for the vegetable garden. It was simple in the sense that it was a 50 gallon metal drum with a wooden board over the top. The rain gutter simply emptied into the barrel and the barrel was allowed to simply overflow when full. Using the water in the barrel was a matter of removing the top and dipping a watering can in the water.

I recently came across this video on youtube.com on how to make a rain barrel from scratch:

How to Build a Rain Barrel

and here is a video from a company which sells ready made rain barrels and / or the parts you would need to build one:

Aquabarrel.com

both of which are a lot more sophisticated than what my grandfather had.

While I don't at all mind watering the vegetable garden, as this will eventually be eaten as food, I've always been reluctant to water the lawn as frequently as it needs it as using all that water just to keep a lawn green seemed wasteful. The rain barrel seems like a good solution to keeping the lawn green during the summer and the initial start up per barrel cost that is only slightly higher than my quarterly water bill.

The Ramapo Tomato

The New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station (NJAES) is the farm extension agency here in New Jersey and they’ve recently started offering Ramapo tomato seeds.

A hybrid is the child of two different varieties which is bred to take the best attributes from both the parents, but also means that the seeds cannot be saved and reused for future plantings. If no one is breeding these plants, the variety will gradually disappear. Sometimes the reason for not breeding the plant is that while the flavor may be superior, the ability to travel long distances is lacking and a more durable, but less tasty variety wins out.

The Ramapo tomato is a hybrid tomato which is supposed to be rich in tomato flavor, was once quite popular, but was no longer available for exactly that reason.

link has the details on how to order the seeds and some interesting articles on the Ramapo tomato and tomatoes in general.

New Jersey has a long history with the tomato. It is in the top 10 tomato producing states, is home to Campbells Soup and has two varieties of tomato, Jersey and Rutgers, named for it. I've already ordered a couple of packets of Ramapo seeds and it is interesting to be bringing back something associated with this history.

The Ramapo tomato:

“For The Ecology …”

Back in the mid 1970's, my grandmother used to put coffee grinds, eggshells, and burnt pipe tobacco she had collected around the base of the plants in the yard and say it was "for the ecology". This is now something that I've started doing as well.

One of the key tenants of organic farming is that healthy soil leads to healthy plants without the need for chemical fertilizers and one of the simplest ways to get healthy soil is by the addition of organic matter to the soil. I've seen various numbers floating around the internet that 25 - 30% of what ends up in landfills is either yard waste or table waste which means most us are already throwing out what we need to make our gardens healthy and we had for free in the first place.

While many people maintain a separate compost heap, here are a couple of things I've simply been adding to the garden during the down season to "compost in place" which both enriches the soil and decreases the amount of what we are throwing in the garbage.

We've started keeping a bowl next to the sink and putting in all the clean vegetable scraps leftover from the preparation of the meal, used coffee grinds and washed egg shells. Every few days this simply gets dumped into the garden and rots away. Normally you should avoid meat, grease or anything else that will attract animals, but I've recently read about All Food Recycling Compost Kit with Bokashi which ferments the waste and apparently is great for the garden without some of the efforts of composting. Check out this link on youtube.com for details DIY bokashi and the rest of the Podchef videos there while you are at it.

The hardest part about raking the leaves in the fall was bagging them up. Now I simply rake them into a pile, load them into the wheelbarrow, dump them in the garden and bury them. They are gone by the spring. Grass clippings are eaten up just as quickly.

At the end of the season, I used to pull out all the dying plants in the garden and bag them up with the fall leaves. Now these simply get pulled out by the roots and tossed on the pile. Some people will argue that this propagates whatever plant diseases you might have had the season before, so be sure to include only healthy plants.

A bale of straw from the garden center is only about $8.00, but many people will buy these as a Halloween decoration and simply throw it out after Thanksgiving and you can pick them up for free. Spread this on top of the garden and allow it to rot away under the snow. I'm also planning on using straw as a natural mulch during the summer to keep the weeds down which also has the secondary benefit of supplementing the soil.

A layer of straw mixed with snow covers the garden:

The Winter Pause

On Friday we got about 6 - 8 inches of snow and today we got another 2 - 3 inches. The last several weekends have also been cold, many of them rainy, and very typical of what November and December are supposed to be like here. There is not much going on with the garden this time of the year other than buying seeds and planning.

Mint buried under the snow:

That Picture In The Header Does Not Look Like New Jersey

The picture in the header was taken in Japan during the summer of 2008 in Osaka prefecture. We were going to go swimming in a river and along the way we passed many small farms and rice fields such as the one in the picture. This was the first time I had ever been out of the city in Japan and shows an aspect of the country that many people might not be as familiar with as those of the crowded streets of Tokyo.

While the picture itself is of an actual farm and this is supposed to be a blog about backyard gardens, it is still a nice, green picture and I think it works well in the header.

In Japan, you see a lot of backyard gardens brimming with eggplants, tomatoes, and cucumbers. It gets very hot and humid early on and by June they are already where we wouldn't be until early August here in the North Eastern United States.

A close up picture of a rice field:

About This Blog

When we finally moved out of an apartment and into a house, the house came with a 16' X 16' raised bed railroad tie garden complete with an in ground sprinkler.  This could not have made it any easier to get started with a garden except for the fact that it had been used for nothing more than a dumping ground by the previous owners.  It was filled with broken flower pots, big sticks and other debris which were not going to rot away no matter how long and the first season was largely spent cleaning out and disposing of the garbage.

The second season went much better in spite of much of it being figured out as we went along.  With a combination of nursery stock and seed packets, we managed to get a nice return of tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and beans with plenty to give away.  Miracle-Gro was the norm back then and not too much thought went into the methods being used.  Everything tasted much better than the supermarket and expectations for success had been low to begin with, so all in all it can be considered a success with seasons two and three being very similar.

Sometime around season four, I happened to read An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.), and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.  The three of these taught a lot about where food comes from and sustainability and seasons five and six now took a different direction. 

I replaced the Miracle-Gro with new ideas like concepts of cover crops, compost, and organic seeds.  The results with the natural methods were just as good as the results using other methods and encouraged by those successes, I’ve continued to read and experiment with different techniques to have a productive garden in a limited space with a minimal impact. 

This blog is a collection of information, experiments, and thoughts on simple techniques in organic gardening, recycling, and beekeeping collected together as you would normally find in a gardener's notebook which would hopefully also be useful to someone else who is starting a new home garden.