It was sixty five degrees on New Year's Day, 2011. I had to start the year off right, so I turned my compost pile. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
While turning the compost, I noticed there was more space in the leaf bin, so I added the contents of three more bags of leaves to it. I even put some compost on top to let the micro-organisms flow through when it rains.
While I was turning the compost and adding the leaves, my wife came and helped me with garden chores by beginning to pull off all the dead bean vines from the fence material. That was a time consuming process, but she completed two rows before I got there to help her. That was a big help to me!
I finally got to the bean fencing and helped with the tedious process of pulling off the vines. It's a funny thing. In the spring, you want them to grow on the fence as quickly as possible. In the fall, you wish they were off the fence as quickly as possible!
In a few more weeks, I'll be harvesting the horseradish roots so I can grate it for some nice hot, fresh horseradish sauce!
This poor little collard plant doesn't know if it's a collard or a miniature palm tree!
After our two days of 60 degree weather, it turned freezing cold again! If you look close at the leaves in the top of the picture, you can see the raindrops that have frozen solid.
One of the good things about these vegetables is that when you see how green they still are, you know they will make a comeback.
That's it for my first post of the new year.
Have a great vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK
Hi Veggie Pak, and Happy New Year. I'm glad to see that you have been knuckling down to the hard work. Much of our hobby in unglamorous, but the results normally make it worthwhile. Your pictures show off very nicely how well-organised your veg garden is.
ReplyDeleteWow, your compost bin is looking so great!! Oooh, you are growing horseradish! I love horseradish. Especially in a good bloody mary drink. Enjoy!
ReplyDeleteI really like how you have your composting area set up. Your bin is sturdy and user friendly.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great feeling to clean up the garden! Your very lucky to have such a pretty helper :)
I've always put my beans on jute so I can just cut it down and toss it in the compost. It does take a while to put up though. I keep wondering which way is better. Or at least faster.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know you had such a large garden, it's great! It will certainly appreciate all your hard efforts at comopost making. I'm pretty lazy about my compst,it almost never gets turned, it comes round in the end...
ReplyDeleteI tried to post my comment last night but for some reason it wouldn't upload so I'll write again! You have quite an impressive amount of brassicas growing! It continuously amazes me how cold tolerant some these veggies are and that you don't have to cover them. Of course it looks like it would be a lot of work to cover your impressive garden!
ReplyDeleteI'm jealous of your compost pile! I can only dream of one that big!You'll have nice rich soil in no time.
ReplyDeleteMark Willis, You're right about being unglamorous, and to me, worthwhile = fun! There are so many activites in the world today that are just a waste of time in my book. With vegetable gardening, even if the harvest turn out poorly, at least you learned something from the activity. Thanks for the organizational comment, but this year, I want to aim for an even higher degree of organization. I really haven't done succession planting, so I want to really give that a try this year. My harvests have been great with just single plantings and no intercropping. This should be an interesting year!
ReplyDeletemeemsnyc, Thanks! I am proud of my compost bin! This morning I picked up about 40 to 45 pounds of coffee grounds from Starbucks for it. I'll be blending that in this afternoon.
I can hardly wait to see what the root looks like on my two year old horseradish!
Robin, User friendly is the key term. I studied the various methods of composting, and this is the best suited for me. The posts are actually concreted in, so it is VERY sturdy.
It is a great feeling to clean up the garden. I wish the weather would cooperate though! We're supposed to get more snow tomorrow, and again on Tuesday! Unbelievable!
Yes, I do have a pretty helper! When I pick up my wife from the private school where she works, the little kids run up to her and say "Your fathers here to pick you up!" Ahh, little kids...
Daphne, Two years ago when I prepared the lines between the posts for holding up my pole beans, I strung a 1/4 inch diameter clothesline tautly at the top and bottom of the poles. Then, I used jute twine and spent hours stringing it up and down, for 140 feet of row! When I finished, I knew I would never do that again! Whew! The fence fabric is so much easier in my opinion. There is another factor as well for me. We get nor'easters with sustained winds that are significant. Even though I had the clotheslines taut, the winds really blew the vines from one side to the other to such a degree that I was concerned about the vines breaking or being heavily damaged. I think the fencing eliminates that threat, so I do like it. As far as faster, you cut the fence to length the first year. After that, you just drive the posts in the ground and pull it tight. It's MUCH faster than stringing lines at that point.
Michelle, My garden does get a lot of compost! As far as turning compost, rather than using a pitchfork or digging fork as some folks call it, I use a hay fork with a long handle and three long prongs. The leverage makes it SO much easier to do! Using a pitchfork is like doing repeated dead weight lifting and is hard work in my opinion. The other benefit of using a hay fork is that you can get a forkful, hold it over the area where you want the compost deposited, and jiggle it and the compost will rain down from the prongs until it is empty. That thoroughly blends and aerates the compost and accelerates the composting process by leaps and bounds. Turning it once in awhile also is good exercise for me. When I first started composting, I turned the pile EVERY day! I even monitored the temperature in the pile before turning it. To me, it was fun because it would improve the food I was growing.
Jane, it IS amazing at how much harsh weather these plants will take! Even the Swiss chard! Covering my garden would indeed be a tough job, and very expensive! So, the plants just tough it out for me.
Annanas, Thanks! One of the most important things that I do for it is to chop things up into small pieces. It is very helpful in speeding up the process of composting! Actually, I try very hard to NOT put anything in there that ISN'T chopped up.
Thanks to each and every one of you for your contributions to my blog! I appreciate every visit and comment as if I were meeting old friends!
Have a great vegetable gardening day!
Veggie PAK
I hear you about how tedious it is to clean bean vines off the trellis. Someone once suggested stringing twine up and down a frame so that so when the season ended all you had to do was cut off the twine vnes and all and toss into the compost. I have even thought of cutting down the trellis, leaving it to compost and then removing it but that wouldn't be right, would it. Would it? I like the twine idea.
ReplyDeleteYour collard looks a bit like walking stick kale at the moment.
Ottawa Gardener, It all revolves around how much total stringing a person has to do. Even though the twine will decompose, if you're a compost turner, I think that will end up making a tangled pile of compost. Based on my experience, at least with the twine I used, twine can easily take more than a year to decompose to the point it doesn't cause turning problems. I like to take the lazy man's way out and use fence material.
ReplyDeleteThanks for visiting and sharing your comment.
Have a great and warm gardening day!
Veggie PAK
Looks like you guys made some good progress getting things ready for the upcoming growing seasons. My chard looks just like yours -- mostly brown on top, but with a few new growths popping up.
ReplyDelete.09 Acres, it's good to hear from you. I think I'm going to go through all my chard and cut off the brown leaves in hopes of steering the plant energy to the new growth, rather than having some of the energy go to trying to repair the damaged leaves. I think that should work.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with your garden during this crazy winter we're having!
Thanks for your visit and comment!
Veggie PAK
That is a great compost pile and set up. I was just thinking that I need to turn and combine my piles this coming weekend.
ReplyDeleteRemoving the bean vines IS a major pain in the patooty! I much prefer stripping pea vine (tendrils are easier to remove than true vining (spiraling) plants!
kitsapFG, Thanks for the compliment! I'd like to explain my theory I apply in my composting because it may be of interest to my blogging friends:
ReplyDeleteIf you'll notice how wide my hot bin is, you can see how much easier it is to work. I even designed it with the front lower fence slightly below knee level for ease of use. If a person uses the 3 bin type of enclosure, or even a 2 bin one, you still have to lift each and every forkful OVER the top of the dividing wall(s). The way I do it, a person only has to lift half of the material 1/2 of the way up in height, because the first forkfulls of the bottom half of the pile were basically left to right lateral motions. This way, you can allow the pile to spread to the left or right, whichever direction you're pitching it in. Also, using my method, when you drop the forkful of compost towards the back wall/fence of the hot bin, when it begins to gain height, the compost will tumble down towards the low fence in the front, because using gravity, the compost is seeking the "natural angle of repose". When the compost material does this, it mixes and aerates even more thoroughly. Once you reach this angle/height at one end where the bottom of it is at the top of the lower front fence, you then begin piling it a little to the left or right, depending on the direction your pitching it, so you will be making an elongated top of the compost along the high back of the fence.
In reality, only the "reasonable center" of a 3 bin setup is actually in the right condition/mixture for ideal composting. At least, that's what all the books I've read on the subject indicate. If so, why do it that way? To me, my method of having a wider hot bin means more effective composting is being more easily achieved because the "reasonable center" is so much longer than what you can achieve in a square cube of compost material. Each person likes their own style, and that's fine. I just like this method of composting because I think it's easier to do and has more productive results.
That was rather long, but I hope it is a good explanation to share with everyone so they'll under stand why I do it this way. Even so, it still boils down to personal preference, which is fine.
One more thing to consider is time. Since my method employs less "fork-time" with compost being transported on it, it actually ends up being faster to turn the entire pile than it would a compost pile of equal volume using the 3 bin method.
I thank you for visiting and sharing your comments with me!
Veggie PAK
Hi Veggie PAK,
ReplyDeleteThe hibiscus is a tropical plant so ideally it likes temperatures of 60F – 90F to bloom. Apparently it cannot tolerate temps below 32F, our porch got down to the 40s on really cold nights since it's not insulated or has heat going out there. I thought maybe it could live in 40 degree temps but it doesn't like it at all. Not sure what the weather is like in Virginia, but you may want to keep it indoors during the winter. In the spring in summer it loves the outdoors, and full sun.
Mimi
meemsnyc, We're having a much colder than normal winter here. I brought mine into the house and will keep it inside until spring. Then it will get a nice sunny spot in the yard.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
Veggie PAK
Thank you for visiting my blog! I very much commend your organic efforts! Our dairy farm is organic, but I'm pitiful when it comes to gardening. I'm so very jealous of yours, maybe I'll get there someday!
ReplyDeleteMilkMaid09, and thank you as well for coming to visit mine! I'm glad that your dairy farm is organic! Gardening can be any way you want it. You can stick the plants in the ground and never pull the first weed. Just pick the vegetables when they are ripe. Of course, more care means more vegetables... usually. Making sure they don't die from drought is probably the most important thing to do for the plants. Water, even just once a week, but thoroughly.
ReplyDeleteI started my garden with a 12 x 12 plot. As I became more and more enthused about it, the size of it grew as well! One year, I planted the plants, not seeds, and didn't pull a single weed. I still got so many cucumbers and tomatoes that I couldn't carry them all!
Just give it a try, and let it work itself into your busy schedule. It will work. You'll see!
Thanks for visiting,
Veggie PAK
Very nice blog... Thanks for stoppin by Our Little Farm. Cant wait for spring to get back in the garden.
ReplyDeleteJennifer, Thank you! I can hardly wait for spring either!
ReplyDelete