The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Garden running a week behind

Hardneck and softneck garlic

Mountain of broccoliDue to a very cold winter and soil that warmed extra-slow this spring, the garden is running about a week behind last year.  That means our garlic isn't quite ready to dig yet, but we still have four pounds left from last year, so I'm not terribly concerned.

I harvested broccoli a week late too.  We'd been eating broccoli nearly every day since last Tuesday, but the majority of the heads were suddenly in need of picking early this week.  Since I decided to ditch the shelling peas this spring and plant broccoli in their place, I ended up with so many heads that they barely fit in my basket.  2.75 gallons of broccoli now in the freezer!

New potatoes and carrots

This week also heralded the beginning of the year's roots.  I pulled some new potatoes from early beds planted just for that purpose and also thinned out part of a carrot bed, saving the fingerling carrots to go in chicken soup.  I plant my carrots thick on purpose since the seeds sometimes don't germinate evenly, and since I like being able to harvest Baby cucumberlittle carrots early without using up my main crop.  The carrots left behind will now have room to grow big and sweet.

Despite the slow spring crops, it looks like our summer vegetables might be ahead of schedule thanks to judicious quick hoop use.  I think this cucumber is going to be ready within the week!

Our chicken waterer keeps your flock happy even on scorching summer days.


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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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Is hardneck good, and softneck not good? (or are they at different stages?)
Comment by J Wed Jun 8 09:44:22 2011

I probably shouldn't have thrown that label on the picture since it wasn't really relevant to the post. I just couldn't resist, since you could see the difference so clearly.

Hardneck and softneck are two different kinds of garlic, not different stages of the same garlic. You can see the "hard neck" in the photo as a darker center.

What shows that the garlic's not ready to harvest is that the cloves aren't all big --- the center ones still have some growing to do.

Comment by anna Wed Jun 8 11:29:18 2011
aaaahhhh see...cool! Thanks!
Comment by J Wed Jun 8 19:40:47 2011
Always glad to tell you more than you wanted or needed to know. :-)
Comment by anna Thu Jun 9 06:42:52 2011





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