6 Reasons To Rake Your Own Leaves

This year, all the leaves in the yard were raked by hand with a rake. It really wasn't all that much more effort than with the leaf blower and made me feel good for several reasons:

1. A rake does not make exhaust and does not contribute to global warming.

2. Raking leaves burns more calories than watching t.v..

3. It saves money. Rather than hiring someone, it costs very little to do it yourself and a rake costs less than a leaf blower.

4. A rake de-thatches the lawn and brings up maple seeds, small rocks and sticks and other junk that the leaf blower would leave behind which makes the lawn healthier.

5. Rather than going to the landfill, the leaves can be dumped in the vegetable garden for some added carbon to the compost.

6. Have the family join you. Raking leaves together as a family is better for you than watching t.v..

Seed Saving - Purple Peas

Peas are an early season crop that like the weather slightly cool. As the days are getting hotter and longer, the pea vines are now turning brown and it is time to start saving their seeds. This year I had planted Purple Peas from the Hudson Valley Seed Library.

1. Save from the best stock which will pass on their good genes to the next generation. The one that climbed to the top of the trellis first or the one that started to look like a small shrub rather than a bean bush are good choices. Make sure the plants you pick are free of disease or any other problems. Take from more than one plant to add some diversity.


2. Select the best fruit. Do you have fruit that you took a picture of to show off? Those are the ones for saving.


3. Let the fruit dry on the plant until the pod turns brown. This will usually be 4 – 6 weeks past the time you would have picked the fruit for eating. If you are doing this late in the season and the weather is turning cold or wet, pull the entire plant and hang it upside down where it is warm and dry until the pod is finished drying. Now should be early enough to let them dry in the field.


4. Shell the peas as if you were preparing them for dinner. Discard any seeds which are unusually small, wrinkly, mushy or otherwise odd. Place the seeds on a cookie sheet or paper towel and put them in a warm dry place allowing them to dry further. Do not put them in the oven, toaster or other artificial heat source as this cook them and render them useless for planting.


5. Put the seeds in a container and store them in a cool, dry place. An envelope like a seed company would use is more than sufficient or for larger quantities a jar or piece of Tupperware will work well.

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: