Raised Pots - A new science experiment

I've been thinking about doing this for a while.

7 years of pots—a solution looking for a problem

I really want more raised beds for my veggies, after moles killed my snow peas by lifting them out of the ground, and almost did the same to half my spring broccolis. BUT—as everyone knows, raised beds cost $$$$—far more than a year's supply of frozen broccoli. Meanwhile, I have a large pile of pots just waiting for me to recycle them. So I took my six baby winter brocs this morning and gave each one a mole-free and hopefully vole-free home in a 2-gallon pot.

2-gallon pots, fiberglass mesh, and a baby broc

I started with 1-gallon pots, but then I remembered how big my spring broccolis got, and how thick those stems were. I don't want to crowd their roots. The drain holes in the 2-gallon pots are big enough to let a vole or a baby mole through, if it were lucky enough to find it, so I lined the bottom of each pot with 1/8" fiberglass mesh, the same stuff I used under the strawberry raised bed. I really can't see any critter wanting to chew through fiberglass, it's inert, and little roots can get through it if they want to.

Buried in the soil, ready for insulation

I mixed in store-bought compost with the soil, just for a bit of extra tilth and drainage, and then dug a hole and buried about 4" of the pot in the soil. I didn't want to bury them all the way, which would help keep the roots from freezing, because that would make it easy for voles to climb into them, but I didn't want to leave them completely exposed, because that would make the soil more likely to freeze during the freezing spells. If we do have an extended freeze—like the ten-day one we had a few years ago—then I may lose them anyway. As the soil warms up and they start to grow in the early spring, I'm hoping the slight elevation will help the upper soil drain well and maybe warm up a bit earlier than the surrounding soil, which is one of the major benefits of raised beds.

Just need a few more leaves

After I planted each one, I filled the top 1" of each pot with a mat of the decaying hay from this year, and then I'm filling in leaves around and over the pots, which will help insulate them and block weed growth. I'm hoping that the only difference they'll notice from being in the ground is that they have a little better view.

So, now we sit back and see how they do. I really should have planted them a month or two ago, but I blew off a lot of my garden chores this fall while the weather was nice in favor of painting outside in my garden, which was one of the most fun things I've done in years.

As I dug the holes I found some subway tunnels, and lots of small, really deep, or half-eaten potatoes that I missed when I did the big dig. No wonder I always get so many volunteers every year. I'm shifting my potato culture to the west half of the garden next year; I've been growing them in the same rows for three years, and although I didn't see any disease, I'll rotate them for a year or two.

A great year for veggies

The veggie patch, right center

It not only looks like summer in the garden—it tastes like it, too. I've really neglected this blog this year, but at least I haven't neglected my veggie patch. It's really been producing for me this year. I've been getting snap peas for supper two or three times a week for the last month, I've almost finished off the broccolis—except for the bits the slugs got first—and even got a couple of little beets! I even harvested several servings of potatoes, both from this year's All Blues and from a couple of volunteers I missed harvesting last year.

The hay is working better than ever, one light initial weeding is all I've had to do. And I'm happy to say that when I pull it back to sneak some taters, I see ground beetles and earthworms and little millipedes, all hard at work. I definitely still have slug issues, and probably wouldn't have gotten any broccoli, kale or parsley at all, if I wasn't regularly sprinkling Sluggo around. I am watering earlier than I did last year, but not too much because there's still a lot of moisture in the soil. But the potatoes I've pulled up have been beautiful and shiny with no sign of scabbing. They're also a bit bigger than last year, even this early, because all the new sets got planted in the really good soil.

My garlic is bigger this year, but still not full-sized by any means. I'm going to pull it up on time though, let it dry out, and replant the cloves in October, as I'm supposed to. Maybe I'll get full-sized plants next year.

I harvested an artichoke this afternoon! It's only 3" long but it was starting to look like it might be opening, so I jumped the gun and took it. It had many ants on it, which I hope I knocked off, and I wonder if I picked either really early in the morning or late in the evening, if they wouldn't have gone home? I remember from my very first garden, which was full of ant colonies, that they always seemed to disappear in the evening. Hmmmm. Next time. I probably don't get up early enough in the morning to beat them these days, though. I'm retired—they're not.

I love the companion flowers I planted, and the air is always full of zippy little buzzers visiting them, and (I hope) eating bad bugs. I probably shouldn't say this out loud, but I haven't seen an aphid yet this year. Don't tell anybody.

Yellow calendulas and flowering bolted kale

My Bergarten sage surprised me with some really pretty, light blue, typical sage-type flowers. It's growing so well in this corner that when I found several on sale at the local Bi-Mart, I bought 4 more of them to put some other places where I need robust, sun-proof ground cover. It's lovely, classy-looking, and tastes great.

Bergarten sage in bloom

 I finally got around to planting some zucchini seed, the soil and the air temps should be warm enough now for them to do well. And just in case we do have a long warm summer, I put out a hill of cantaloupe seed and one of honeydew. They're not up yet, but I'm keeping an eye on them. I'm so happy with the veggie garden this year, it's unbelievably great to go down and pick supper. And besides the veggies I've gotten strawberries, raspberries, and my two dozen pie cherries. I'll try to get more pictures up here now that I'm almost done planting for the season.

Veggie Garden 2.0

If you wait long enough, maybe everything will happen—for instance, my 2 and a half year old broccoli finally headed out this spring! Near the end of March I used a tripod of bamboo poles to lift the stalks up off the ground so it wouldn't be quite so easy for the slugs to get the new growth.

A couple weeks later the flowers were ripe and ready to eat, so I cut most of the little heads off. I got one nice big serving off the two stalks, and it was great! I haven't eaten anything but frozen broccoli for so long that I was surprised how much flavor this had. There is a nice big clump of sprouts from the bottom of one of the stalks that I'm going to thin out and let grow. I suspect they started because the stalks had lain horizontal on the ground from the first big windstorm last fall until I picked them up off the ground this spring. Maybe this is just a really long-lived broccoli.

I left a few bits to flower because they were really too small to bother with, and the companion plant book says they'll attract good bugs. They're almost ready to bloom now. I let the rhubarb flower for the same reason, plus I wanted to see what it looked like.

By that time, the garlic and onions that got left in the ground last year because their tops disappeared had sprouted again, so I pulled up the garlic, divided each one into single cloves, and replanted them. I hope they'll get a little bigger this year; the biggest one I had was only 6 cloves. And I hope I can manage to harvest most of them this year! With a little luck, I'll get them replanted in October this year, when they're supposed to be planted.

I planted several different companion flowers in with the veggies this year—calendulas, gaillardias, alyssum, and cosmos. Even if they don't attract enough good bugs to make a difference, I really like having them just because they make my garden look better—and I love flowers. I just put them in a few weeks ago, so they haven't done much yet, but they are growing.

I made two other changes to the garden as a whole. I stapled up some 3-mil plastic along the fenceline to do three things: To stop me from watering the weeds in the pasture next to the garden; to keep the weeds from leaning into my garden and dropping seed; and to create a small, possibly slightly warmer microclimate. It will also partially block the really hot dry chinooks we get in the summer. The second change is my new permanent paths. The previous owners left me a pile of short cedar fence pieces and strips of plywood that I had never gotten around to getting rid of, and they make somewhat satisfactory pathways. This was another recommendation in the companion plant book, to reduce soil compaction from walking and to reduce the amount of mulch you need.

The peas, broccoli and kale that went in first are doing great! After the weather really started to warm up I thinned them, although I see from this picture that I didn't get all the extra broccolis. I hate thinning—it seems like I'm wasting plants—but some of the sprouts were so close in the packs that I couldn't divide them as I was planting.

The peas are growing great guns now, and the biggest of the little brocs are almost a foot tall.

The kale is bushier than it is tall, but it's looking really good. I've had to keep putting out snail bait, and I almost lost one of the little plants. Those are calendulas in front of them.

I really wanted to grow parsley this year because I love cooking with it and it seems so silly to buy it when you can grow it. I think I'm really getting into growing herbs. I'm not that much of a cook. Period. But so far they're easy to grow, and it's really nice to have fresh spices when you do want them. Parsley is so good with potatoes or on garlic bread. So when it warmed up a bit I put a 6-pak in next to the garlic, except for one I put in a patio pot in case the slugs got the garden ones. It's taking them a little while to settle in, but now that we're getting some warm weather I think they're getting happier.

I did make one purchasing error this year when I was buying spices. I grabbed a tarragon that looked lovely but when I got it home I found out it had no aroma at all, and I couldn't understand why not until I came across Russian tarragon on the web yesterday. It's a different species that is described as having little or no flavor (!) but growers sell it because it makes viable seed and is easier to propogate than French tarragon which can only be propogated asexually. So now I have to try and find the good stuff and keep it alive through the winter. Nominally I'm in zone 8b, but the strong winds, heavy rains and heavy clay combine to make some parts of my garden the equivalent of zone 6.

I turned out to have more potatoes this year than I planned on. I was only going to plant All Blues this year, because they were soooooo good last year. But as it got closer to  planting time, none of the stores were getting them in, so in desperation I bought some Purple Majesty, then Cherry Reds and Russian Banana fingerlings. After I had bought all of these, a farm supply ten miles away advertised on CraigsList that they had All Blues. I drove over there on a particularly cold, wet day, and they did have them, nice big fat sets, in fact bigger than any of my blues got last year. I couldn't help buying 5 sets, so at that point I had enough potatoes to fill up half the fenced area, twice as many as I had intended to grow. I resolved to start eating them sooner this year, so I won't have so many at the end of the season. I presprouted them again this year, and planted them the first week in April, the same as last year. I wasn't going down to the garden much during the two or three weeks of almost continuous rain we had, and when it finally stopped and I looked again, they had all popped up and were growing like crazy.

I have gotten one big surprise as the soil has warmed up the last few weeks—I missed harvesting at least a dozen potatoes! I've had potato sprouts all over where I planted them last year—and some of them were good-sized! And I thought I was so thorough.... I pulled all of them up except for some of the Rose Finn Apple fingerlings, which are where some of my herbs are growing this year. I didn't want them to mess up my rotation scheme, and honestly, I think I'll have enough potatoes. But this harvest, I'm going to have to be a lot better at digging them!

I haven't put any new hay down yet—there was still enough stuff down to keep weeds from sprouting, and I wanted to give the sun a chance to warm the soil as much as possible. I think it will be going down soon, though, just to keep the soil from drying out.

I think the biggest improvement for this year is that when it was time to plant, I had everything ready and the weather cooperated fully, so things got planted on time this year. So even though last year was a limited success, it was a great learning experience and I'm seeing the benefit of that now. Hope I can keep the momentum going.

Re-starting the garden

It's warm, then it's cold, then the sun comes out, then it starts to hail, then the wind comes up, then it rains, then it rains some more, then it rains another two inches...and there you have it—Spring! Time to re-start the garden!

Some of the first plants at Fred Meyer last month were their six-packs of veggies, and it was soon enough after payday that I decided to jump-start the garden and get something growing. I came home with kales, broccolies, and snow peas. I've never bought any plants this early before, and I was happy to find that none of them were root-bound—they were all at the perfect stage to plant out. I went out and scraped the oak leaves back enough to plant the babies, and got them in the ground. What was left of the hay was really matted down and far from the fluffy golden stuff I had last summer, but it was still covering most of the ground, and an inch or two thick where it still lay. However, there were enough bare spots that I was glad I had gotten the bags of oak leaves for additional cover. The leaves look practically new and I'm thinking they'll be lasting a while. But maybe they'll start rotting when the soil warms up and the micro-organisms get more active.

A row plus two of baby broccolis

Peas and their pea-rsonal trellis

Little kales

I dug some chicken manure into their beds, and had to use the big pick to break the hardpan where I put the kale. I had found some used willow trellises last summer on CraigsList and they hadn't found a place in the garden yet, so I decided to try them for the peas. I cable-tied them to the fence and stuck in an extra fence post to help hold them, and so far they seem pretty sturdy.

The next day there was seven inches of snow on the ground. I waddled down to the veggie garden in my wellies and took some pictures.

Most of the snow landed on the broccoli, close to the back fence.

The fruit trees all decorated.

A few days later, after the snow had melted, I went down to see if anything got snow-smushed, but everybody was fine. The kales had turned purple but were still alive. One kale did get slug-nibbled, so I put out slug bait. Snow and slugs. Sheesh.

So, I have a new garden! I also have a refrigerator drawer full of pre-sprouted potatoes, and they'll be going in during the next dry spell. I do have seeds to plant, too. I wanted to try kolrabi and bulb fennel again. But if I don't have any better luck with those this year, at least I'll have my cold-hardy things to eat. I have managed to clean out all the weeds left from last year, so it feels like a fresh, new garden.

It feels so good to be able to get out and work in it again, even if it is just one day a week.

Potatoes Everywhere!

I'm beginning to see the wisdom of planting cool season crops in the Willamette Valley—it's almost the end of May and my soil temperature is only just now getting up to 52º—that's ten degrees too cold, at least, to plant beans. But my peas, broccoli, potatoes, kohlrabis, onions, garlic and radishes are doing great! It's too cold to plant the zucchini and pumpkins I want to, and of course melons are out of the question.

You can see the long row of potatoes in the middle, and if you look hard you can see the short row on the far right, and the three smaller, scattered potato plants on the left side of the thick hay. The short row was short by design—those are the 6 Red Pontiac sets. The row on the left was attacked and disrupted by something that burrowed under the hay, made it look like the dirt had been turned over in places, and disappeared most of the ten sets there. A potato-eating mole? It didn't disturb the hay—I didn't discover the damage till I started poking around in the row looking for sprouts. I don't know for sure, but I think that's the Rose Finn Apple Fingerlings, which makes me sad. I think the long row is the All Blues. The onions you can see are growing really nicely, and I finally figured out how to tell them from the garlics: the onions just have leaves, but the garlic has a stalk. The garlics I put up in the blueberry patch are doing just as well as the ones down here.

Some good news on my overwintered broccolis—two of them have decided to grow for a while longer before they head, so I might get more than the fingertip-sized head I got from the smallest one.

The kohlrabis suffered a bit from slugs before I put out bait last weekend, but they're looking a lot more robust now and I'm thinking they'll make it till harvest—if something else doesn't get them.

The snow peas just keep getting taller, but they're starting to fall over. The package says they don't need any support, and also said not to thin them more than every 2 inches, so I'm not doing anything else to them for now. The slugs didn't go after them, which surprised me a bit.

And last—and least—the daikon radishes have really started growing now. Just a few weeks ago they were nothing but seed leaves, and now they're starting to look like plants. Looks like they need a bit of weeding.

I did get my cardoons planted out a couple weeks ago, but they're not very exciting yet, still putting down roots and not growing up yet. I've tried to protect them from deer, rabbits and slugs, I'm not sure who would eat them but they look pretty vulnerable to me.

I was on the verge of trying to start more collard seed when I  found a nice looking 6-pak of baby collards, so I bought them. Need to plant them. They look exactly like kohlrabis, just like the web article I found says. So much so that I'm wondering if my kohlrabis are really kohlrabis. All will be revealed....

Next month, I WILL try to start a couple zucchini plants and some yellow squash, and my tuscan Kale, and more of the dozen packages of companion flower seeds. My yarrows and chamomile are ready to put out; maybe I can put them out tomorrow. We're supposed to have another dry day.

You can see in the photos that there are many areas with a lot of grass sprouts among the veggies. Every place where I put a thin layer of hay—less than the 8" of loose hay—is pretty densely grassy. There are also more than I'd like coming up where the hay is actually thick, but there are also some areas that look grass free. When I get to it, I'm going to just dig up all the unwelcome grass, and now that I can see where the veggies are, I'm going to put down more hay everywhere. I need to start mounding it up around the potatoes anyway, they're getting taller every week. You could guess that the grass seedlings are from the hay, but I'm not so sure because I have grass seedlings coming up all over that part of my garden—for as long as I've lived here. I'm guessing that when I let the hay get wet, it did sprout seeds, so maybe it's half and half, mine and from the hay. Because I've got pastures on two sides of me, I'll always have grass seed blowing in. I do know that if I had not put the hay down, the whole garden would be completely full of weeds.

One thing I noticed when I was in there two weeks ago looking for potato sprouts, was that a very thin layer of the hay on the very bottom, next to the dirt, is staying very wet and looking like it's thinking about rotting. But that's no more at this point than the bottom 1 or 2 strands of the bottom layer. All the hay above that is dry and golden. The ground is so moist—as it should be from the amount of rain we've had this spring—that I don't even have to think of watering anything at this point. When we do start getting more than two dry days in a row, I'll be checking it regularly. The potatoes need to stay moist while they're forming, both to keep growing and to help prevent scabs.

I really do enjoy walking past it and seeing the veggies poking up through the shiny gold hay while I'm weeding elsewhere in the garden. That's pretty much all I'm doing now. I do hope to get caught up some day so I can get back to planting all the goodies I bought this winter. Big plans and little plants!