Down on the Farm--Part Two: The Garden

Mother-in-law and Father-in-law have great gardening skills. The first thing I want to do whenever we go to their farm in Wisconsin is get a tour of their garden to see all the things they are growing. While there, I picked some onions, peas, cabbage, cauliflower, and berries. Almost all the veggies we ate for the whole week were fresh from their garden. Father-in-law's sister also has an amazing garden. She makes the best salsa from it. My mouth waters just thinking about it. Some day, I hope to have a garden like theirs, but that will take some time, especially considering we are confined to our organic patio. Obviously as a first-year gardener, it will also take a lot more experience. Here are some pictures of the garden on the Wisconsin farm.

Here you can see onions, beets, cabbage, cauliflower, pole beans, bush beans, peas, and more!

These are their tomatoes and a few peppers. The tomatoes had a rough start but have recovered and are doing well. Mother-in-law and Father-in-law got a variety pack of heirloom tomato seeds. Can't wait to see what kinds they get!

Here's the middle section of their garden, showing the onions and beets again. On the left, you can see their spent asparagus, then all their potatoes. They have a variety of potatoes, including blue potatoes. I had never seen these tomatoes before. They had purple skin and purple insides! Some of their potatoes had seeds/fruit growing from where the flowers were. Have you ever thought of potatoes having seeds? Have you ever tried planting the seeds?

The best part about the farm is the peacefulness. There are beautiful views of all the hilltops in the area. When I wake up in the morning, I am so happy. I look out the windows and say, "Good morning, World!" The view is so great that it seems the lands respond, "Good morning, Mariwood!" Here's what I look out to see in the morning.



We had a special treat this visit. Some of the wandering cats have found food and lodging at the farm. One had kittens, which were about six weeks old when we got there. They were lots of fun. A special blog hello to Runt, the most funnest little orange guy in the front! Next week, they should be in their new home as a family on a nearby apple orchard. I hope they have a great time exploring and mousing. I miss playing with Runt so much!

Down on the Farm--Part 1: The Dairy Farm

Husband and I were on "vacation" last week. We went to visit his parents/family down on the farm in Wisconsin. Although his parents don't farm the land themselves, they rent it out to their neighbors, who run an Organic Valley dairy farm. Somewhere on the website is a picture of one of the farming family members, but I won't tell you where. His picture actually hangs at our local organic market. Whenever I see it, I feel like I know someone famous. Maybe you can tell, I'm in love with this Organic Valley farm family and always enjoy my visits there.

I try to make it a point to observe the things they are doing on the dairy farm to learn more about the work and lifestyle. Last week, the big project was mowing, raking, baling, and storing hay. You can learn more about this process at Wikipedia. I got to see each step in the process and even had my first tractor ride! I've always wanted to ride on a tractor. How I wish I had a picture! I'm worried they secretly think I am a dork for wanting to follow them around all the time. I also got to see the milking process and the calves being fed. The babies are so cute; a couple were less than a week old!

I think this farm is so admirable because the father has gone to take an executive type job at the Organic Valley headquarters in Wisconsin. He travels around lecturing and recruiting farmers to organic farming and Organic Valley. His two sons now run the farm. The oldest, who has the main responsibility, is only about 25--younger than I! He is really inspirational to me because I often feel like a kid that can't handle the responsibilities of adulthood. And here he is, running an entire farm! The younger son is in school for Agricultural Engineering and spends his spare time developing his biodiesel projects. These guys are so cool!

Do you love family farms? Do you buy Organic Valley? Do you ever wonder which organic dairy products are best? Do you ever wonder how organic your brand is, or how nice it is to their cows? Go to the Organic Dairy Report Card.

Tomato Emergency Update

No need to worry. Everything seems to be under control, and the emergency has passed. After Gina's inquiry, I realized that I had left people hanging and perhaps wondering if our sad little broken branch had taken a turn for the worse. I was planning on using wilting leaves as my cue for certain death, but I realized the broken branch is only flowers and fruit--no leaves! How can I know that whether the poor branch is healing? Will the attached tomatoes start to shrivel? I have no idea. Any suggestions?

A few days ago, we added some half-toothpick splints after deciding that the suggested pencil splits would be too big for a branch that's only about 3 mm wide. Yes, I'm an American who just used the metric system, but I'm also a scientist who can't think of what fraction of an inch that would be--a 16th, an 8th? When we unwrapped the tape, the broken part seemed to be a bit stronger and better attached, but still a little broken. We hope it is on the mend and that the splint suggestion works. As you can see, things look pretty good a week after the break, or at least no worse. Maybe some of the smaller tomato buds have grown a little. The picture is from July 4th and also shows one of our ripening fruits. I'll update you on how those turned out in the next post.

Tomato Emergency!

Mother-in-law and Father-in-law were in town this past week imparting their gardening wisdom on our lowly patio. This morning, as they were getting ready to leave, I looked out only to find that the Santa tomato plant had a severe injury. A fruit-laden branch had broken halfway through! How can I save this?

I thought I might be able to tape it together so that it can heal. However, Husband and I tried this with a jalapeno pepper branch that held a flower bud. I think it was too late for the pepper because it had already started to wilt. The day after the tape bandage, it was clear that the operation was not a success. Mother-in-law said that we could try the tape bandage on the tomato, but that success hinged on the operation being performed very soon after the injury. To be honest, I have no idea when it happened. I don't remember anything unusual yesterday when I watered. However, I haven't been spending as much time in the garden for observation because it has been so Hazy, Hot, and Humid! Still I have hope that the injury was recent because the leaves haven't wilted yet.

So that's what I did. I tried to make a supportive, binding, tape bandage. I don't know how it'll work. It occurred to me that I could try to make a clean cut and try to re-root the broken branch. If I see the leaves start to wilt, I will attempt the re-rooting procedure.

How do you perform surgery on your broken tomatoes? Amputation or reattachment? Do you think my tape bandage will work? Is there a better way to bandage your plants? Should I try re-rooting the broken branch? If so, how should I do this? I'm frantic for answers, as the six or seven vulnerably attached tomatoes must be saved!

Transformation on the Patio

We made big changes on the patio last weekend. We bought some wee cherry tomato plants two weekends ago from the semi-local farmers' market. We go there every weekend, and it tends to be the thing I look forward to doing all week. The problem was we didn't have containers for the cherry tomatoes. Hence, the cherries demanded major changes. So we moved the Santa and Patio tomatoes to a large bin, giving them some more root room and perhaps crowding the above-ground growth. We moved the cherries to some large bins, because Father-in-law said they need a lot of room. We also bought some purple sweet peppers and potted those in the old tomato pots.

Here's what we did. We bought two 18 gallon, and one smaller, galvanized steel tubs and rinsed them. These were cheap and functional, working nicely into our limited budget. Ideally, we would have filled them with water for 24 hours to leach and surface chemicals. I learned this trick from my short stint in oyster aquaculture for my research.





Then we filled the bottoms with about an inch or so of gravel and spread it around. I would have liked to soak the gravel, too, but we never quite got around to it.



















Next, we filled the pails with ORGANIC potting soil
purchased from our favorite farmers' market. Then dug holes and transplanted the potted tomatoes.












These three tomato plants went from this:
























































To this:


And the cherry tomatoes went from packed and thirsty here:
To these two roomy, moist pails:









































The new Purple Beauties peppers went from packed (here) to potted (above and below).





















So in all, my patio garden has undergone an expanded transformation.

My legs were sore for a few days afterward, but I think it was well worth the hard day's work and subsequent pain. What do you think of our set up? Are things too crowded? Is galvanized steel bad? Any suggestions for improvement?

Inside Out

We've done a lot this season, and a lot has changed since we started our patio gardening in March. Firstly, we didn't even start on the patio. We started our goodies inside: the rosemary from the indoor winter garden, five cayenne pepper seeds, five jalapeno pepper seeds, a lot of spinach seeds, and six marigold seeds. The rosemary was in it's own container, a small four inch pot. We planted each of the pepper types at opposite ends of a long window box along with four marigolds. In a smaller window box, we planted about 100 spinach seeds with two marigold seeds.

The spinach went out immediately because it's happy in cold weather. As soon as frost was no longer a threat, which was pretty late this year, the pepper box and rosemary moved out. We added about 16-24 seeds of cilantro and basil to the big window box in mid-April. At the same time, we bought a three tomato plants (one Santa F1 and two Patio F1). Only three cayenne and two jalapeno seeds germinated. The spinach, cilantro, and basil had high germination rates. Here's what everything looked like by the beginning of May:


As you can see, the spinach did great! You might wonder why we planted so many seeds. A friend, who has a successful balcony garden, said he did it this way. You get lots of baby spinach and progressively thin things out as you eat the baby spinach. Plus, we are trying to grow as much as possible in as little space as possible. It may lead to crowding or disease, but that's part of the experiment. How much do you think we can squeeze things? We are just finishing up the remaining spinach now and are looking for a summer nutritious green for sandwiches and salads. Chard, kale, who knows? Any suggestions?

And why the marigolds? The same friend said this would help with our past aphid problem by emitting noxious chemicals that aphids and other pests hate. For the most part, I think it has worked. I still have to do some aphid squishing, which I think is best kept under control by daily squishing. The only suspicious thing is that I sometimes find them on the underside of the marigold petals. What's that about? All I know is that there are WAY less aphids than last year. I think the marigolds have kept most of the aphids away and provided some pretty color to an otherwise monochromatic green patio garden.

I think the spinach provides additional support for my marigold success hypothesis. The marigolds didn't grow as quickly in the spinach box because they were shaded by the spinach, which grew quickly in the cold weather. When we harvested the last of the spinach, the clearance revealed a small, flowerless marigold and that the box had lots of aphids, both winged and unwinged, big and little. What do you do to deter garden pests from ever taking hold?

No Aphids!

I visit my organic patio every day to check for aphids and other pests that need to be destroyed. Given how the aphids loved the cilantro last summer, I feel I must be on a mission to save our new patio garden. See my summary of Last Year for all our past aphid woes.

I have read that you can use a strong spray to knock them off, leaving their mouth parts behind. Apparently, this prevents them from ever feeding again and leads to their imminent death. However, some of our herbs are fragile. Maybe the herbs could survive the strong spray, but I never try. I've also read that you can use natural predators like ladybugs to eradicate the buggers. Some other sources suggest a garlic spray will deter and kill them. Have you used any of these methods? Usually, I squish them right there on the plant. I hear the smell of their dead comrades gives them cause to retreat. Do you have problems with aphids? For more information on aphids and their control, read here and here. Remember, no chemicals--it's the organic way.

Today was the first day that we had no aphids! Victory! I've won today's battle, but what about the war?

My Indoor Winter Garden

After last summer's near failure at the old apartment, we started anew and a bit late in our new place--a townhouse. We moved in at the end of last July and traveled for most of August. Alas, we didn't get to plant anything until Labor Day! We tried the same stuff (basil, cilantro, and rosemary, but no spinach) in the same small window box, only this time we started outside. Things went a little better, but it started to get cold before anything was harvestable.

One mistake we made was that the dirt didn't come up high enough in the box. We think there was too much shade for the wee germs to get a good start. This year we made sure to have the dirt near the top of the box.

We brought things inside when it started to get cold and put the box at the floor of the door to our southward facing patio. Things were growing a little leggy. As the days grew shorter, we caved and bought a grow light. Then everyone was happy and reaching for the sky. Instead of wasting power, we decided to supplement the natural light by extending the light hours using a timer. The light came on about an hour or so before sunrise and went off around 8 a.m. Then it would come back on about an hour before sunset and stay on for another couple of hours. It worked great, though the herbs didn't have the best start.

Have you had any success with growing herbs indoors over winter? Did you use a grow light? How many hours of grow-light light did your herbs get each day?

Again, the basil and cilantro had the best germination rate and the fastest growth. We thought the rosemary was a failure, with only three seeds germinating out of about 12. Plus, the little rosemary stayed small FOREVER! I didn't understand it, but kept hope alive.

When spring came around, we scrapped whatever basil we still had. The cilantro was well past done around the holidays. We transplanted the tiny three rosemaries to a small pot (about 4-inch diameter). The root structure was virtually non-existent. Only one had a couple pairs of actual rosemary leaves. The others just had two little pairs of round leaves. Can you believe it, after six months since planting the seeds?! I thought for sure they were goners. Scientists we are, we were up for the trial and expected error.

Much to our surprise, the wee rosemaries started to grow in their new pot. When our next crop of seeds for the new season were ready to move outside, we moved the now slightly bigger rosemaries outside. They took off immediately! It was only a month before the roots were growing out the bottom of the pot. We happily re-potted the success to a larger pot. I couldn't believe it.

And now look at them, nine months after seeding:

Waiting for pictures...

I keep seeing things happen in the patio garden and want to say something about them. Alas, I do not feel the topics would be adequately addressed without photos. So why don't I just take some photos? Well, our batteries for the digital camera have been out of commission. One's lost, the other dead. Maybe both are dead, but until I find the original, I can't say for sure. Anyways, I ordered some new batteries and have been patiently, or not so patiently, waiting for their delivery. Maybe they'll come today...

Can't wait to share some photographic stories with you.

P.S. I'll be recycling our dead battery properly. ;)

Go Green!

While I'm at it, I may as well talk about the green movement. I have to admit, I don't have the guts to go green head first. I'm just a regular person that tries to do little things when they're convenient and to push myself to do little things when they're not. I encourage, sometimes strongly encourage, friends to recycle when it may have slipped their mind and have, on occasion, moved items from trash to recycling bins. Anyways, I thought I'd make a list of the little things I try to do so that it might encourage others to do the same kinds of things.

My Little Green Things:

1. Save water. Yes, Earth's surface is 3/4 water, but did you know only 3% of that is freshwater. Furthermore, groundwater and water in rivers and lakes make up only 0.3% of the water on Earth. Don't believe me, well maybe you'll believe the BBC. Read it for yourself here. It's hard to imagine, growing up on the East Coast, so I try to remind myself about the Southwest and large regions of Africa. I try to do everything I can to limit the amount of water I use to a minimum.
1. Navy-style showers. Well, I'm not sure that's the real name, but I think I heard that somewhere. This means I turn the shower OFF while lathering up my bod, while shampooing, while conditioning, while shaving.
2. Navy-style dish washing. Okay, I made that up, but it's the same deal. Turn the water OFF while scrubbing and soaping up the dishes. I try to use the water only to rinse.
3. Navy-style tooth brushing. Again a made-up term; you get the idea. I've been doing this since I was really little.
4. Navy-style face-washing.
5. I also try not to waste water when I'm washing my hands by not having the faucet on full blast.
6. I'd like to capture rainwater for watering our patio garden, but we have bad mosquitoes. That stagnant pool of water would make a very happy breeding ground for them and very itchy skin for me. If any of you can do it without the same risk of sanity, more power to ya.
2. Recycle. We recycle everything they'll let us, though I'm still very suspicious about what happens to it after they take it away. Certainly in some counties I believe it actually gets recycled, but I've also seen some very questionable recycling centers. Maybe I should start an investigation. Do you know where your recycling goes? What about your batteries--do you recycle them? Did you know you can even recycle your average AA, AAA, etc. battery? But you have to take those to special places. What about your old electronics, including old computers? I am going to try to take my old PC to be recycled this weekend.
   
3. Reuse. This is a hard one because American consumer products are so disposable. Here are the things I reuse on a regular basis.
1. Lunch items. I take my lunch to work almost every day. I always use a washable and reusable plastic container. I often have sandwiches and bring crackers in a plastic bag. Since the same crackers go into the bag everyday, I just keep using the same bag. Is that gross? I don't think so. If I bring carrots in a plastic bag, I reuse that, too, but I rinse it between uses.
   
2. Water bottle. This is very important: I use a hard plastic water bottle at work instead of consuming dinky pre-packaged bottled water. Usually, the water in those things isn't any different than filtered tap water anyways. My husband and I just ordered aluminum water bottles for ourselves because I learned this is better for you than plastic. Plus they're recyclable if you decide you want to switch to a new one.
3. Grocery bags. We use these to bundle our recycling, as bathroom trash bags, to carry a few things around, etc. They just keep piling up. I wish grocery stores wouldn't waste them. Sometimes they'll only put a couple of little things in one bag. We like to bag our groceries ourselves whenever we can.
4. Paper. I like to use bad print jobs for scrap paper. Everyone in my lab does this. We all also print double-sided whenever possible. Speaking of paper, does anyone know how to stop all the junk mail? It saddens me to think of all the wasted paper in credit card offers. Plus, they can be a security risk for people who aren't diligent about shredding.
   
4. Save electricity.
   
1. We've changed almost all our light bulbs to those energy efficient ones.
   
2. We turn off the lights whenever we leave a room.
3. We use a programmable thermostat in the heat and air condition months. However, we try to extend the months when we don't need either by opening windows and strategically opening or closing curtains/blinds, which allows or prevents the entrance of natural sunlight into the house.
4. We've only just started to try to turn off some of those electronics that sit in standby mode until they get used.
5. Save gasoline and reduce pollution. I'm currently in a data analysis stage of a research project. This allows me to work at home instead of making the half-hour to hour long commute in each direction. It saves me time and money. Plus, I get to look after our patio garden, which brings happiness to every day. Not everyone has this flexibility, but what about public transportation?
6. Use natural cleaning chemicals. We're just trying to phase these in now. Sometimes we can't afford them.
   

These are just some of the things I do. The great thing about many of them is that they also save money, which is a welcome side-effect for poor graduate students. Do you do any of these or anything else? Do you want to try to be more green? I saw some good tips on Ellen's May 22 episode. You can find lots of good links to green-related products and info on her website and navigating to that day. I found some more ideas for going green while saving green, if you know what I mean, and realized there are some that I do but didn't list.

Go Organic!

It occurred to me that I hadn't even explained why we're doing an organic patio garden. After all, it is our first time attempting a patio garden. Why give ourselves additional constraints within which to work when we're just trying to get things to grow at all? Then again, maybe the reasons to go organic are obvious. Sometimes it seems like a problem would be easier solved if we just used more conventional methods (e.g., pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizer). But I'm a biologist who loves a good field experiment and am up for the challenge!

My Organic Reasons:

1. No harmful chemicals in food. Seriously, the chemicals used for growing conventional foods are nasty and can cause health problems. Imagine putting something that was sprayed with chemicals to kill an insect (an animal) into your digestive system. Remember you're also an animal. Have you ever looked at a super-shiny apple in the supermarket and been completely disgusted by the amount of wax that must be covering the fruit? Being that I'm the gardener, I especially want to avoid handling such nasty chemicals.
   
2. Saves the environment. Where do all those synthetic chemicals sprayed on conventional crops go after a rain? They can't all stick to the target crops and can end up harming non-target wildlife on land, in stream, and in ocean. The pesticides could also harm the beneficial critters helping your garden grow. Considering all the environmental problems facing the world today, I can't see a justification for contributing even just a little bit. As a biologist by day, I love to do even the little things that I can to save the environment. And who doesn't want to do that?
3. Supports family farms. Okay, so our patio is the family farm in question, but this is why we like to buy organic whenever we can. Yes, many organic products are now getting commercialized and perhaps larger scale. Still many large distributors are supplied by smaller farms. Ultimately, we try to buy local produce at our semi-local farmers' market or local natural food market, even if it's not always organic.
4. It's natural. What a learning experience about nature! It's great to figure out and observe how natural things can work together to give desired results.
   
5. Tastes great. I'm not sure how our garden will turn out, but I hope what they say is true, though I've never seen any statistically supported taste test studies to confirm the claims (the scientist in me talking). I can at least say from experience that the organic tomatoes my father-in-law grows are the best I've ever had. Believe it or not, before eating his tomatoes, I didn't like tomatoes that much. I could take 'em or leave 'em. Now I love a good tomato and am always in search of one.
6. It's cheaper than store-bought. It's not a reason to go organic because organic food is obviously more expensive in the stores. In fact, prices are so high that we can't afford to buy organic as often as we would like. Given our reasons to go organic and the fact that we are poor, struggling grad-students, we may as well grow our favorite things ourselves and save ourselves the store mark-up.

So, hey, let's all go organic and save the environment and the local family farm!

Last Year

Last summer we made our first try at indoor veggie and herb gardening. In one long window box, we planted spinach, basil, cilantro, and rosemary. I know, it was ambitious and a bit crowded, but we had to try it to see what, if anything, would grow. We bought seed packets and potting soil at the local gardening and hardware store and planted everything in the one box all on the same day. I think it was May when we planted, but I can't be sure. We placed the box in a northeast facing window.

The reasons:
We wanted to try our hand at indoor gardening of herbs and vegetables to see if we could do it year round. We love to have baby spinach in salads, but we usually use it on our sandwiches in place of less nutritious lettuce. My husband can't get enough cilantro. We had hopes to put it in homemade salsa and on other Mexican type dishes. As for the basil and rosemary, we're always finding them to be common ingredients in recipes. We figured we'd rather have an "endless" supply of these herbs than buy a pack from the supermarket only to use a small portion and have the rest rot before we can get to it all.

The problems:

1. The direction that the window faced was suboptimal, but it was the best we could do with the windows of our apartment. Still, no trees or other buildings were around the window, so when the sun came in, it had a clear shot at the window box.
2. The humidity in the apartment was a bit high. Mold was a happy camper in the apartment, but never grew on walls or anything like you hear for serious mold problems. You wouldn't believe the trouble I had trying to get fresh fruit to ripen on a counter faster than it would get moldy. I eventually had to abandon my favorite summer fruits, peaches and nectarines, because I could never get them ripe before the mold started. For those of you out there who are eating crunchy peaches and nectarines, you don't know what you're missing from a fruit so juicy it drips down your face. Yum!...but I digress. So the mold would sometimes take hold of the soil in the window box.
3. The aphids and other bug-a-boos eventually found out how tasty our herbs were. Yes, I did say this was an indoor gardening experiment. See attempted solution #1 for an explanation. The aphids and other bug-a-boos saw their opportunity and took advantage. One day we woke up to find the cilantro covered in an aphid infestation! The horror! The green aphids mainly stuck to the cilantro and sucked the living juices out of it. Near July, we started to have these small, round, black dots, which were bugs. They didn't seem to be eating any of the plants, but would set up shop and make these web-like lines all over the plants. They seemed to like the basil best, but could also be found on the spinach and just cruising around the window box. I still have no idea what these things were.
   

Attempted solutions:

1. To dually address problems #1 and 2, we would place the window box outside for a couple of days at a time to get some more sun and to dry out a bit in the fresh air.
2. I did some research on aphid control by searching the internet and asking friends with experience. The common answers were to get some ladybugs, which will prey on the unsuspecting, feasting aphids, or to spray soapy water on the cilantro. Many sources said the ladybugs would fly away after a couple of days. I wasn't prepared to let ladybugs loose indoors. Anyone who's ever had ladybugs invade their home knows that it's something you'd rather not repeat. As for the soap, we didn't want to involve any chemicals if possible.
3. So here's what we actually did. Everyday, I would wake up and spend maybe 45 minutes with tweezers picking the aphids off the cilantro. At one point I thought I had them under control, perhaps even eradicated. But a week later, they reappeared with a vengeance. If you haven't looked into the aphid life cycle, it's fascinating. Check it out here and here.
   

The results:
The rosemary had a very low germination rate. Only about three popped up out of maybe 16 seeds. These were the slowest to germinate of the four things we planted, but that was expected from the estimated times. However, there was a huge window of weeks between the first and the last to germinate. We had similar results with rosemary in a planting we did on Labor Day last year (2006). The few seedlings that did grow stayed very small and weren't worth saving at the end of the experiment.

The spinach had a very good germination rate, near 100%. It grew very leggy, i.e., with long thin stems and small leaves. Very few leaves grew before the plants spiked to flower in early July. Our experts said it wasn't getting enough light. As the spinach was headed downward, the little, round, black bugs started to invade it. Needless to say, the spinach was never harvestable.

The basil grew really well and seemed to be happy in our window box. I think more light might have helped it grow faster, but it was definitely doing well. As I said in problem #3, the little, round, black bugs really liked the basil. This made it somewhat unappetizing. When I dismantled the window box indoor garden experiment, I harvested the basil and rinsed it thoroughly. I then froze the leaves, but I don't think we've ever used them. I couldn't get rid of all the little black bug-a-boos, so I was less than enthusiastic to eat bug-basil.

The cilantro was a bust! It also grew leggy, though less leggy than the spinach, probably because it needed more light than it was getting through the window. Still, it didn't do too poorly and might have been a success if the aphids had never colonized. They sucked out any strength the cilantro had--a real tragedy! If I had been making an aphid farm, I would have been very pleased.

The indoor organic garden wasn't a complete failure. I think it could have been a better success with a south-facing window and no outside time to be colonized by nasty pests. Oh well, better luck next time with our new found knowledge and experience.

Have any advice or questions?