Green Thumbs: Gardening in Northern Utah

I just found the Grow Better Veggies Website, by Cynthia Sandberg of Love Apple Farm.  She has an amazing class list and in my dreams I could pop over to Santa Cruz and take her classes!  Here’s the link to the class list, and here’s her main website.  I’m drooling just looking at all the beautiful vegetables in her header.  Oh, spring can’t come soon enough!

2007 was not a great gardening year for us.  I’m not sure if it can even be called “good”.  Nope.  It can’t.  I thought, for awhile, that the problems we were having were because we were learning how to garden in a new place.  It is so different here than in California.  The planting times are quite precise.  In addition to that, the weather did a number on us.  We had such a long, very hot summer that our tomatoes didn’t even do well.  That surprised me so much, because I always thought tomatoes needed lots of heat.  Turns out that too much heat can be just as bad (or worse) than too little.  I wish I saved the article I read, but when it is over 85 degrees for too many days in a row, the tomatoes won’t redden or increase in size.  We ended the season with a ton of small, green tomatoes hanging on the vines.  I was so sad.  I had planted a ton of Roma plants to can and make sauce out of.  I only wound up bottling a bit of homemade V8 and some salsa.  The tomatillos never grew – the plant did great, but the fruit never happened.  The zucchini did fabulous, as usual, and the sunflowers did, as well.  The eggplants never got very big, but the bell peppers next door did really well.  I was a bit relieved when the farmer from our CSA sent an e-mail telling everything that he was sorry we didn’t get much each week – the weather was just terrible this year.  I thought that if a long time Utah farmer couldn’t get a good crop to grow, then I was excused this year, too!

The things I did way wrong – planted the peas way too late, and even tried to transplant some.  Peas can be put in the ground as soon as it’s warm enough to be worked (when it’s still really cold out) and should never be transplanted.  The other early spring crops did really well – the chard and spinach and lettuce.  We were getting really tired of new ways to eat chard and spinach, so I was glad when it warmed up.

The gardening catalogs have begun to arrive in the mail, and there’s 2 that I’m toting from room to room.  The Burpee catalog and the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog (rareseeds.com).  Nathan and I are thinking about splurging and putting our Christmas money towards a glow-n-grow deluxe light garden from Burpee.  Page 131 is going to fall out of the catalog if I’m not careful.

Isn’t it pretty?  We’ve also been looking into buying the lights and building our own out of PVC to save some cash.  Whatever we do, we’ll need to get on it soon since we’d be able to start some of our cool weather seeds in just a month.

We’ve decided not to add anymore boxes this year.  If I’m remembering correctly, our 4 boxes add up to at least 112 square feet of gardening space.  We’ll put our melons, pumpkins and squash other places through the yard, so 112 square feet should be more than enough space for this year.  I don’t know how much preserving I’ll be in the mood to do with a new baby.  Maybe more than I’m thinking – but I can always go buy more produce for that.

We really don’t need many seeds this year – we have a lot left from last year since I didn’t know about “hardening off” seedlings until I killed almost everything and had to go buy plants.   There are some heirloom seeds from Baker Creek I really would like to try, though.  White tomatoes and orange watermelons top the list.  From Burpee, I’m thinking about the Super Growing Cubes to give my seeds a better chance than they had last year, and the Burpee Booster for peas and beans.  Our beans grew, but not well, even though the soil was excellent.  Maybe I got them in too late?  Maybe it was too hot for them, too?

The last thing (for now) that I’m drooling over for the garden is this:

Burpee’s garden hod.  I’d love to find one at a local garden store, flea market, or antiques place.  Even a really great wire or wood basket would make me happy, too.

I’m really late starting these seeds – especially the tomato ones. I should have planted them beginning to mid-April, and here it is May 10. Hopefully it’s not too late and these will still work. I did 9 of each seed for now, and will do more in a week or so. All are Burpee.

1) Super Sweet 100 Hybrid cherry tomatoes: “Deliciously sweet, bright red, cherry sized tomatoes produced abundantly in long, multiple branched clusters.” Seedlings will emerge in 7-14 days at 70-80 degrees, and tomatoes will be ready to pick 70 days after plant is put outside.

2) Streamliner Hybrid Cucumber: “resistant to mosaic and mildew; produces amazing yield of slender fruits up to 10.5″ long; excellent for slicing.” Seedlings emerge in 7-14 days, harvest 60 days after sowing.

3) Fourth of July Hybrid Tomato: “Rich flavored, 4 oz fruits ripen exra early on high-yielding plants, ready about 49 days after transplanting outside.”

4) Ambrosia Hybrid Canataloupe: “Luscious flesh is firm, juicy, very sweet and edible down to rind. Nearly round fruits are uniformly 6.5 X 6 inches.” Ready to harvest about 86 days after sowing.

5) Burpee’s Big Boy Hybrid: “heavy yield of huge, smooth, globe-shaped fruits often weigh a poun d or more. Thick, solid, bright red flesh with mouth-watering flavor; excellent fresh or canned”, ready to pick 78 days after transplanting outside

6) Porterhouse Hybrid Tomato: “Absolutely huge beefsteak tomatoes from 1-4 lb each are bred for super sweet and tasty flesh; true home-grown flavor”, ready 74 days after setting outside

7) Kentucky Blue Beans: “a green pole snap bean with round, straight 7″ pods combine the best features of Blue Lake and Kentucky Wonder, but are sweeter than the latter; bears over a long season.” ready to start picking 65 days from sowing

8 ) Golden Mama Tomato: “enormous crops of 4-5 oz golden yellow paste tomatoes that keep the color even after cooking; yields over a very long season.” Ready 68 days after setting outside.

I ran out of the small white plastic markers that came with the seed trays, so I broke 4 plastic forks in half and numbered those to remember what is in which quadrant. I’m really hoping these seeds are more successful than the last batch!

We have sprouts!  One broccoli, a few cauliflower, and a few of the peas (peas-n-a-pot variety).  Of course, two days after planting, I read that pea seedlings transplant poorly and should always be sown outside.  Too late for this year.  We’ll just hope these do ok!

Seeds aren’t so fun (for me). Last night I told Nathan that we’ll keep these seeds, but unless we have at least 50% success (which he said sounded normal – fifty percent is normal???), he can play with seeds all he wants and I’ll stick to buying plants.

The seeds that I planted about 3 weeks ago were a disaster. I kept the little green house lid on them, and took them outside every morning, and brought them back inside (almost) every night. We’ve got mean winds here, and after they got blown over 3 times, I gave up. Josh ate a few pockets of dirt (and probably some seeds) and I decided I was done for now.

Last night I decided to give our spring seeds another shot. Same six veggies:

1 – Broccoli, Green Goliath

2 – Cauliflower, Early Snowball

3 – Lettuce, Buttercrunch

4 – Peas, Garden Sweet

5 – Peas, Peas’n-a-Pot

6 – Spinach, Harmony Hybrid

This time, I soaked the seeds in water for about an hour before I planted them, and I planted a bunch more than the first time. My fingers are crossed, tightly, for at least 50% success. Success means not that we will get a sprout from the seed, but that we will get a vegetable off of the plant after I transplant it to the outdoors!

Until we get a grow light or green house, I’ve got these babies sitting on my heating pad, and under the stove light. I also checked out a Burpee book at the library today about how to be more successful with seeds. I’ll take any help I can get.

The outside garden is a happier place than our inside seed starts.

We’ve got two 4X8 foot raised beds in the garden, with the starts of our compost in between. Nathan has done an awesome job on the raised beds. We got three 16′ vinyl fencing ‘planks’ ($16 each at Home Depot), one 12′ post for the corners (I think twelve feet…$10?), and caps for the top of each corner ($1 or $2 each).  Those materials are enough to make 3 beds that are each 8X4 feet.  I’ll let Nathan go into detail about how he put these together, but they were pretty quick and look really nice. Check out his slick corners:

The hardest parts of the beds (says I, who had no part in the actual construction of them), were 1) getting the 16 foot planks home, since Home Depot doesn’t do courtesy cuts on vinyl like they do on wood, and 2) making sure the beds are totally level before filling them with weed cloth and the dirt we bought.  We filled the first bed with dirt just before our storm last week and planted on Saturday.

We’ve got 3 tomatoes, 4 broccolis and 2 red cabbage plants in the ground. Today at IFA I bought more tomatoes, cauliflower, swiss chard and romaine lettuce. The grid system is part of the Square Foot Gardening method, and will supposedly help us get a full garden in 20% of the space we would have used with a traditional row garden.  We’re thinking about getting 1/4″ or 1/2″ vinyl slats and screwing them down for a permanent grid, but we’re still not sure.  For now, we drilled small holes to put nails in, and used a white rope for the grid.  We’ll see what happens when the wind comes up again.  The plants I planted look disorganized in there because they each needed more space than one square foot.

The tomatoes are (hopefully happy) planted in their wall-o-water teepees. Each tube in the teepees are 2/3 full of warm water, and when the plant grows, we’ll fill each tube full so the teepee will fully open. I’m thrilled we found these at the garden show we went to in March. Without them, we couldn’t plant tomatoes here until at least Mothers Day – Memorial Day to be safe. Hopefully we’ll be eating tomatoes by June 1st!

I went to IFA for dog food and a grow light (for the seeds I’m retrying) and found chicks and pop-up greenhouses, too. Came home only with the dog food and some vegetable plants (you’re welcome, Nathan). These are quite possibly the coolest things ever. They fold up nice and small for storage in the winter and summer, and with one shake, they open up ready for use.  These will make gardening in the cold climate much more bearable!  Google “pop up green house” to find where you can buy them online.

We’re excited! We bought all the ingredients for “Mel’s Mix” of dirt this morning and got some seeds going this afternoon.

1 – Broccoli, Green Goliath

2 – Cauliflower, Early Snowball

3 – Lettuce, Buttercrunch

4 – Peas, Garden Sweet

5 – Peas, Peas’n-a-Pot

6 – Spinach, Harmony Hybrid

Three of each seed are in today, and next week we’ll do a few more to stagger planting times.

All seeds are Burpee except the cauliflower, which is Ferry Morse.

Found a great 6 page handout by the Utah State University Extension for the beginning backyard composter.

Click here to get to the document.

I was looking at their catalog last night, and even at 80 pages, I was busy for almost an hour writing my list of seeds for next year.

I would love to try these Orangeglo Watermelons.  They also have a Carolina Cross seed that grows fruit 65-150 lbs.  One of those seeds grew a 262 lb watermelon!

Have you ever seen a white tomato before?   This is a picture of their White Tomesol tomato.  Other tomatoes I want to try of theirs:

Purple Russian

Pink Accordion

Green Sausage

You can get to the Baker Creek Web site here.

It’s almost time to start our new garden! We are SO excited to have a nice big spot just out our back door instead of out our door, and down the road about 5 miles! A few months after we were married we happened upon a community garden close to our house while on a hike and we felt like we hit a pot of gold. It was awesome while we were living so close to the spot in downtown Walnut Creek, but after we moved to Concord and Jacob was born, it was a lot more difficult to make the trip to the garden. Plus, we had problems with gophers that ate tons of our plants and I had problems with one of the huge snakes that was squatting on our land. So we haven’t gardened since 2004. This year, we’re BACK!

We put in a big (too big?) order for Burpee seeds that should be here in the next week or so. I started a Family Garden Journal this morning. We have really awful clay soil that would take a lot of time, money and resources to become workable, so I think we’re going to use the idea for “Mel’s Mix” soil from the All New Square Foot Gardening book. And I’m hoping to get some free wood from the construction sites on our street to make some make-do boxes for this year. I’m super anxious to get things going so we can get started on our cool winter veggies right away. I’m also excited that gardening is something Nathan loves, too, so we can spend the time planning and planting and watering (and hopefully not weeding) together outside.