I learned in the heat of last fall that if I put up a framework over a raised bed and covered it with shade cloth, I could get both carrots and lettuce to germinate as long as I sprayed them a couple of times a day. I did that morning and evening until the plants germinated and then watered a couple of times a week with a soaker hose.

We didn’t take the shade cloth off over winter. We covered the whole thing with two layers of 4 ml plastic sheeting (paint drop cloths) and made a mini-greenhouse type thingy. The shade cloth kept it from getting too hot if the sun came out on a day that Jan had not opened the ends to vent it becuase it was too cold in the morning and then had to leave before it warmed up. We had lettuce all winter. We still have some but I will have to pull it this week and plant spinach and chard. The carrots could have been planted earlier. They didn’t get very big (they’d make lovely baby carrots for a special dinner of some sort right now) but they’re still growing. I’m not sure what I will do…whether I will pull them or if I will continue to let them grow. As well as they did, I’m thinking that if we planted a larger covered bed about July, we could probably have carrots to eat all winter in spite of 5 degree temps.

We are putting in some new raised beds and hoping to perhaps put up a hoop house this summer that we can use next winter instead of covering each bed individually. I’ll keep thinking about it and have a decision after I get the remnans of this year’s garden pulled.

The Kale and winter scallions did well this year without cover as did the turnips. The turnips and greens were beautiful until,during a warm spell, the flea beetles descimated the turnip greens!

Today, we bought six chicks! Maybe they’ll eat our squash bugs next summer! We can hope!

We haven’t had much rain this season (knock on wood!) which is a relief after last year’s 104.57 inches, so I have begun watering because everything is growing so slowly. Tornado season has just begun and Hurricane season is approaching so we still have the chance of a very wet spring, though. We planted sunflowers two weeks ago and they are about two inches high. Last year’s Lemon Balm has come back with a vengence. YES!

Kim and I have decided to put in an herb garden. We have three sides up so far. We need to define where the walkways and small patio for table and chairs will be and then we can begin planting our herbs. Much of the garden will be taken up this year with annual flowers.

Jan is going to till a section of the garden this week so that next weekend, we can lay weed cloth and mulch and then make spaces to grow the winter squash and melons. We need to do successive plantings of the melons so that we have them over a longer period of time than one planting would give us. We need to do that with the cucumbers as well.

We’re looking for tall bamboo poles now so that we can plant a few pole beans.

The Orient pear tree was loaded with blossoms this year and has set good fruit but I noticed today that it has fire blight again. This week, we will get out there with a ladder once the danger of storm has passed and once more cut it out.

I have ordered two dwarf apricot trees that will probably come next winter for bare root planting. One of them is disease resistant. There was only one listed with that quality so I hope the other does okay as well, but I’m going to have to really keep an eye on it.

We have our first ever apple on one of our trees. I’m as thrilled as the first time we had a single fruit on the Orient pear.

We have several fruits on the two year old dwarf peach but we need to re-fence it and need to think of some way to keep the raccoons from getting the fruits as they ripen.

We have so much to plant and so much weeding to do that I hope next weekend favors working in the garden!

We are putting in an herb garden this year. We have three of the sides of fence up. Need to buy a couple of more hog panels for that. We planted sunflowers on three sides. Planted a few zinnias in the corn bed where we had some room. One of our parsley plants has come back from last year as well as one sage. We will need to plant more. This year, we have a place for the herbs rather than just scattering them about haphazardly.

The Italian parlsey did well and the marjoram is just now beginning to come into its own. The basil was planted late but we got a good crop. The Jerusalem artichokes look very good but we won’t know if they produced many tubors until it’s time to begin harvesting. The oregano did well.  We planted three sage plants among the vegetable plants and they’re starting to flourish.

I harvested about half of the multiplying onions to replant this fall and left the rest to use as scallions over the summer and fall…which we were able to do…but leaving so many was a mistake as they’re beginning to die down and I’m wondering if we’ve lost most of what is left.  I’m not sure what to do so I’ll explore that when our current spate of storms is past.  I had hoped to use them through the cool fall and into winter. We have so many that I had begun braising them with purslane.

We discovered purslane when it came in a mesclun mix that we got from The Cook’s Garden one year. It has flourished weed-like in the garden ever since and I’ve done all I can to encourage it. Purslane, for all that it’s considered a weed by many, is more nutritious, I read, than spinach. I like spinach, but I like purslane better.  It has no poisonous look-alikes and it self-sows.  Every part of it that grows above ground is edible and I read that the stems are even more nutritious than the fleshy leaves. It can be eaten raw in salad and it can be cooked. I like it both ways and when I cook it, I cook it so that it is still slightly crunchy.  I will try to remember to add a photograph of purslane in my next post.

I like purslane because it is readily available in most gardens for three-quarters of the year if we can refrain from digging and composting it! And best of all, it’s FREE. FREE is good in these economic hard times.

Kim and I finally did replant part of the garden but it wasn’t until early August when we planted 28 tomato plants…some of which are bearing now, but few of the large tomatoes seem to be ripening…. We’re getting a few from the Cherokee Purple that I planted from seed and we’re getting some Italian cherry tomatoes that I planted from seed in  5-gallon bucket, refusing to give in to Mother Nature without a fight.  We’ve harvested a few cherry tomatoes from one of the 8 plants in the raised bed toward the back of the lot.  The Cherokee Purples are bug-damaged and the one that I bought into the house to ripen before more bugs got to it came laden with fruit flies.  We’ve got a good crop of them!

All that said…a while back, sorely disappointed in the loss of the spring garden, I made an executive decision that we would sacrifice some of the garden to put in raised beds before next spring. The only problem with that decision is that it takes more money than we have all at one time to do the complete garden so we used some old pine lumber to construct a few small temporary beds that we will take out as we are able to construct more beds of cedar.  We have a few temporary veggies planted…planted late, of course…none of which is bearing at this time but we have hope.

In the meantime, Jan started pouring concrete “paver” walkways around the large raised bed that we have the tomatoes in at this time…and as he went along, we have added our first permanent cedar raised bed that is roughly 2 feet by 12 feet.  As we put in each raised bed, we will mortar between the pavers that surround it.

Jan pouring "pavers".

Jan has worked so hard on the walkways. His poor arthritic knees have paid the price but once they’re in, there will be much less weeding for any of us to do and his knees won’t spend nearly as much time in contact with the ground.

In the photo above, the raised bed to the left is our temporary tomato bed. It is made of 2 X 6 pine but it will be replaced before Spring with 1 X 12 cedar with reinforced corners. The raised bed that we have just finished still needs to be secured to the ground via stakes and filled with soil so we can plant part of our fall garden in it.  We will built at least two more beds exactly the same size this fall for kale and multiplying onions, if nothing else, but am hoping to get one in for a few turnips and garlic as well.  We cannot go without kale. And we cannot do with out garlic!  Kale is a staple in our household in winter. We’re hoping to turn Kim on to it as well. Last year, we introduced Lindsay and Hugh Bragg, Angela and Jack McLaughlin, Carolyn Marriott and Judy and Harold Hines to Kale and they’re converts!  Garlic is a staple year round! I’m hoping to get a couple of more beds made even after we finish the original three so that we will be able to plant more of a winter variety including leeks in January or February.

Once we get the raised beds and the “paved” walkways in, as our friend Lindsay Bragg has pointed out, we will have a potager. I would like it to be more attractive and esthetically pleasing than it will probably be but we’ll love it however it turns out…as long as it produces this spring when we have what has been predicted as another extremely wet spring because of this winter’s El Nino.  If our raised beds do their job, they will keep our garden from the same fate as our last spring garden.

What we really need is a very cold winter to kill some of the *#^! bugs! Maybe we’ll luck out and get a good snow!

This time of year, we do the outside tasks early and then retire to the house with its myriad fans and the AC even if it is set high at 78 degrees.  One afternoon last week, when I was preoccupied inside but enjoying the AC of Bale Honda in Little Rock, a location decidedly cooler than our own, I got to thinking about how, since this is summer and goat milk time, I’d best get my arse in gear and start making goat cheeses for the off season (I can store them in olive oil for several months), so on Friday, we took a trip to get goat milk in Haynesville (Louisiana) because it was closer than getting it in New Boston (Texas), 20 miles the other side of Texarkana, when our car is not completely repaired yet (it will be returning to Bale Honda on Tuesday because the needed part has arrived).  

When we got home with the goat milk (it is Nubian, by the way), I set about pasteurizing one gallon of it using the double boiler method.  I raised the temp to 165 and held it for the allotted time and then cooled it in ice water until it reached the proper temperature at which time I added the culture, covered it and cleaned up my mess.

I figured since it was too hot to do anything outdoors, I’d make a quart of yogurt…which I got to culturing. Then while I was on a roll, got out a pint of the hormone-free cream I had picked up at The Fresh Market in Little Rock (much against our 100-Mile Diet philosophy) the last time we were there and a quart jar and shook my way to a nice container of fresh butter.  It tasted SO good!  I poured the resulting butter milk into the jar the cream had come in to be savored at another time. 

I grew up only having tasted cultured buttermilk. I didn’t like it at all; it was too…tangy, I guess.  When I tasted REAL buttermilk that was the by-product of the butter I had made, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. It was…sweet and rich!  It made me wish I had a cow so I could make butter all the time and drink all the buttermilk I wanted…and I detest milk!

I felt like I had accomplished something when I went to bed that night but because I was so gung ho to get to the cheesemaking earlier, I hadn’t thought about what time I started the cheese until I had to set the alarm to get up at 2:30 a.m., after it had cultured 12 hours, so I could transfer it to the molds so it could drain!  This is not the first time I have been that excited to get started.  But every time I do it, I swear it’s not going to happen again!

The next morning Kim came over to work in the garden. We didn’t do a lot except water because it was so hot. After we finished and we were talking on the patio and having a cool drink, I told her about the previous day’s cheese, yogurt and butter-making. We have a date for our first cheese-making lesson next weekend!  I asked her how she would like to make some butter as we sat there and you should have seen her face…the idea that such a thing could be so easily was a surprise to her and she just lit up!

Got out the other pint of cream, the trusty quart jar and we went to town. We shared the shaking experience and before we knew it, we had butter! Just that easy. I explained to her that if we had a churn, we’d be moving the plunger up and down until the butter coagulated. I used to have a bread machine that had a butter cycle. I loved it. But it is a comfort to know that we can use something as low-tech as a Mason jar and still make something as wonderful and delicious as real, unadulterated butter. 

Kim went home yesterday with a small container of butter that she had helped make, two green cabbages, Italian parsley, green garlic, Genovese and Lemon basil and marjoram.  I told her she could use the butter and green garlic to make a sauce for some pasta, if she wanted to, and then sprinkle it with chopped parsley and maybe a bit of Parmesan.  I think she made it for dinner last night.

We had it this evening with zucchini and yellow squash cut lengthwise and sauteed in olive oil with small white onions from the garden and a plate of Caprese.  It was delicious!

I still have a gallon of goat milk to pasteurize and make into four more little cheeses.  I can’t do it tomorrow or Tuesday but will spend my Wednesday in the kitchen again and we will pick up two more gallons of goat milk on Friday.

This afternoon, we bought 20 pounds of tomatoes from Curtis Lewis. Sometime this week, probably Wednesday, I’ll start canning them. I have them laid out now so the slightly green ones will ripen.  Last year, we made a lot of tomato juice. This year, because we use tomatoes more often than we drink the juice, and because the gardens aren’t doing well, I think I will can tomatoes first and think about doing tomato juice later if we have enough. Our own tomatoes won’t be producing much for a couple of months yet (long story…lots of heavy Spring rain) so I am hoping that I will at least get enough cherry tomatoes and yellow pear tomatoes that I will be able to can them whole in jam jars to use in salads over the winter when the Mexican tomatoes taste like cardboard. We don’t buy many of them; we usually do without because they’re not local. I bought them a couple of times last winter and was disappointed both times but hopefully, this year, we will have some sunshine in a jar.

We also need to call to find out if Suzanne’s Fruit Farm has peaches yet.  We need some to make jam for winter and I’d like to can a few jars. They’re very expensive but it is nice to have a few in the cupboard for winter.

When the ground was too soggy to plant our summer garden and half of what we had already planted (including 20# of potatoes) had drowned, I became desperate to get something growing. I took two hanging baskets and planted a cherry tomato in one (from seed) and a yellow pear tomato in the other (seed).  I also got four 5-gallon buckets. In one of them, I planted another cherry tomato (from seed) and in the second, I planted a yellow pear tomato (from seed). In the third, I planted a bush zucchini that was described as having a medium color with lighter ribs. In the fourth bucket, I planted a zucchini described as being a runner with very light skinned, almost white, fruit.  At present, the plants that are doing the best are the tomatoes planted in the 5-gallon buckets.  The light zucchini is doing well and has a fruit on it. There were two smaller zucchini on it that have since turned yellow and need to be picked off. I must investigate the cause of this.  The bush zucchini remains very small but has flowers on it.  I’d feel better if it were larger. The tomatoes in the hanging baskets are growing, one more than the other but I don’t remember which is which.

The smell of the tomato vines has taken me back to my childhood several times lately to when I was six and my friend Ricky Stonier, who lived across the street from me, and I used to play out behind her parents’ tool shed where her mother used to grow cherry tomatoes. Nothing ever tasted as good on a hot summer day as those sun-ripened morsels of forbidden fruit!

As Kim wrote earlier, Jan is building raised beds in the garden with nice walkways around them using paving stones that he pours into plastic forms. We don’t want to have the same experience of not being able to get into the garden in the Spring again next year, because of sinking up to our ankles in mud.   Jan tells me it will be ready by spring… it will, I know, as much as we can afford by then, anyway. 

This morning, before Kim arrived, I planted seven tomato plants.  She drove us to get more. We picked up more Romas and some beefsteaks.  We will have a total of 21 plants in the kitchen garden.  We also got six cherry tomato plants which we will plant out back in a raised bed that we’ve had for several years . We planted three beefsteaks to fill a row that was already started but didn’t plant the others because I wanted to soak the ground first and have it nice and moist for the roots of the new plants.  I spent all day watering the back bed for the cherry tomatoes (it reached 109.7 degrees)  and Kim soaked the kitchen garden bed before she left It drained all day. I was going to plant the remaining 7 tomatoes in the kitchen garden this evening, but as it turns out, we’re having a lightning storm.  I’ll do it tomorrow evening. 

The day is close to its end now.  It is still 83 outside but I’ll bet it smells wonderful. I’m afraid to open the windows with so much lightning though…

Today was dangerously hot by late morning. We sat on the patio supervising Jan’s heroic destruction of all weeds in the new raised garden. The new concrete pavers and raised planting areas are transforming the kitchen garden.

Bonnie is making cheese from goat milk that she buys in Texas and Louisiana. She promises to teach me how to do it next weekend. She is also making yogurt and gave me a yummy smoothie recipe. While we chatted about the progress of the garden while I was on vacation, Bonnie asked if I wanted to make butter! She poured a pint of organic cream into a quart Mason jar and we took turns shaking it for 15 minutes. This was just the strength training I was needing! It’s almost butter in this picture, but now it’s a beautiful tub of pure butter in my refrigerator.

When we bought the fruit trees, for the most part, we bought what we could find locally thinking that they would grow best here. And they may if we were farming conventionally but we’re not.  I will begin looking for and planting disease resistant varieties. If we lose the trees we have now, we will at least have the new trees and if we don’t lose our present trees, we’ll have tons of fruit when the trees are mature.

Jan and I will need to get out and put framework up for the deer netting because they’re starting to help themselves to the peach trees. Two years ago, they helped themselves to the better part of our 4 foot persimmon trees that weren’t even bearing yet.  They were one-foot nubs by the time we discovered the damage.  They have had wire cages around them for the last two years as they have come back (one has blossoms this year) but the cages need to be replaced with taller ones.

The beautiful 4-foot high, 6-foot wide met with tragedy at the mercy of some uncontrolled clippers  and only about 1/10 of the bush remains. I wept.  We will get new rosemary bushes…several…and we’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again.  It’s interesting that the larger the investment, the less damage that happens to our permaculture.

We have larvae of Colorado potato beetles in the potato patch. As soon as the storm is over, I will be out there picking them off the plants before the larvae kill them and before they turn to beetles.   I wish we had some chickens to feed the bugs to. I feel like it’s wasteful to destroy them but the chickens are a way off yet.

Kim and I weeded the kitchen gardens yesterday after two weeks. It’s amazing how much difference a week makes.  After Debbie’s graduation on Friday and the end of Elizabeth’s semester, they will be here to garden again…unless…H1N1 continues to spread and in that case, Jan and I will handle the garden until the virus disappears…for now.  I am asthmatic and the medication I take makes me very susceptible to pneumonia, the killer in this case. I am extra high-risk so we won’t take chances. It has come, as far as I heard on KSLA the other night, to Texarkana.

Yesterday, Kim and I harvested onion scapes, Romaine lettuce, mizuna, arugula, baby spinach and two mesclun mixes.  Kim also took cuttings from a broccoli plant that put out a partial head and then becan to bolt.  They would be good in stir fry.  The basket I cut for Jan and me made a lovely salad with lots left over for tonight and tomorrow night.

Won’t we have some delicious salads this week?! Arugula and mesclun are first up. Reminds me of the great pizza at Figs in Boston. I use Romaine leaves for all kinds of sandwiches and salads.

Below, see the still-early lettuce mix on May 2.

Irises have been peaking for a week or more in the area. Roses are also beyond gorgeous during this time. Bonnie’s Iris steals the show, but look at the healthy oregano, yum.

We’re letting the leeks go to seed. Aren’t they cool looking? Lovely investment in future goodness.

I’m intrigued to try jerusalem artichokes. Bonnie also plans globe artichokes, and we talk about horseradish and asparagus. I asked about growing ginger, but ginger will not grow in Arkansas because although it may love our hot humid summers, our winters get far too cold. Ginger is a tropical plant.

You can almost see the humidity of the day in these pictures. Trust me, today would feel like a cool breeze a month from now in south Arkansas.

The peaches look good, but we’re not sure whether the fruit will be good. It looks like animals are beginning to find the fruit, probably deer. Jan and Bonnie will put up netting around the precious fruit trees before we go any further on the garden.

While not a fruit tree, this tree below has been decimated by something, again likely to be deer. Both the leaves and branches are destroyed.

The new growth on this olive branch cheered us.

Our biggest thrill today was finding the persimmon blossoms! Jan and Bonnie have planted such an interesting variety of trees. We wonder if anyone else in our area has a persimmon tree? Bonnie is very curious to know how successful it will be.

We’ll be doing companion planting with the summer crop. Corn, squash, and beans have a large future home. I can’t wait to see the design of the tomato garden. Carrots will be planted with the tomatoes; and marigolds to keep insects down even more. Bonnie and I spent a few hours dotting carrot seeds on newspaper strips with flour/water paste. We’re not wasting one of these tiny seeds. We had fun doing it on a rainy Saturday. We chatted nonstop and Jan kept us going with cappucinos.

Bonnie let me harvest the first ever veggie that I planted, English peas. I cooked them with butter and fresh green onion served over salmon with pasta, lemon sauce, capers, and parsley. Romaine lettuce looks ready to cut a few leaves. Can’t wait to do my weekly grocery shopping in the garden!