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From commentor Hafabee:
We live in the Potomac Highlands of WV, and the weather has turned cold with a hard freeze predicted in a few days, so it is time to say goodbye to the remaining garden plants, mostly tomatoes. No need to let the greens go to waste, though, or spend any unneeded effort. It took me ten minutes to put up the portable electric net fence and let the goats have at it. These two pictures were taken less than 24 hours apart.
***********
Wish I could turn goats (or at least the urban robot version) loose on my so-called garden. It’s November and we haven’t quite had a killing front here north of Boston, but it’s visibly time & past time to stop pretending the last stubborn cherry tomatoes and Cherokee Purples in the driveway planters are going to ripen any more fruit. This year was an #epicfail for the morning glories, too. I put in a couple transplants every May, and usually they send out rampant vines before finally starting to flower around Labor Day, but this year two of the three seedlings died post-transplant and the survivor put out exactly one blossom… on Columbus Day. And now I’ve got about a leafbag full of slimy dead plant material to strip off the shepherds crook in the front yard. (I know, it’s crazy to encourage an overbred version of bindweed anyway, but the Spousal Unit loves the blue flowers.)
What’s going on in your gardens this week?
raven
They would have a field day on out kudzu! We’ve decided since our addition is postponed for another year that we’ll have the yard re-graded and I’ll rebuild the steps for the porch. I was wondering what I was going to do with all the vacation time I have in December!
JPL
Any ideas what I can do with all my arugula? I’m going to freeze the kale in a few weeks because it makes a great addition to salads.
raven
@JPL: Try dis.
Lee Rudolph
Down on the south-facing coast of MA, where we usually get the first killing frost within a few days either way of October 15, we still haven’t even had a touch of frost; the nasturtiums are flourishing everywhere. The last tomatoes gave out about that date, anyway. We’ve harvested (and eaten or sliced and frozen) most of the sweet peppers, but the pasillas and anchos are still on thriving bushes. Yesterday afternoon we visited a friend in Providence. What with the urban heat-island effect and all, she’s still got roses.
geg6
Nothing left but the few herbs still going in the sunroom. We haven’t yet packed up all the empty pots from the deck plants. They look sad to me. All I have to look forward to now are Thanksgiving (best holiday ever!) and the three weeks I’ll be off over the holidays (Christmas, second worst holiday ever!).
JPL
@raven: Thanks. I saw several pesto recipes but since I don’t eat a lot of pasta, I don’t use up all my basil pesto. I’m going to use the ice cube trick then I can add it to rice dishes or soups. Hopefully, I’ll still have some in the garden for a salad on Thanksgiving.
raven
Oh yea, our fall collards and kale are looking good.
And look look, it’s getting light out!
Lee Rudolph
@JPL: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the kale is thriving. The variety we have, at least, can stand quite a bit of frost; last winter we were harvesting it until the big January blizzard buried it, and by April there were green leaves on the plants again. It’s not quite a perennial for us, but what with that kind of persistence, plus its prolific self-seeding, we have it fresh most of the year, so I’ve never even thought of freezing it. Maybe I should.
I’ve gotten into the habit of stirring a bunch of (chopped or torn) kale leaves into tomato sauce and the like, at the very end, so they just heat for about 1 or 2 minutes, turning bright green (and losing a lot of volume). The result is gorgeous, tasty, good for you too. I don’t know if that would work (as well) with kale from the freezer, but why not?
ultraviolet thunder
Man, I love kale. We grew it in our small garden when I was a kid, and kale tastes like summer to me.
Just feeling a little homesick.
I’m in the German Schwartzwald at the moment, land of meat (fleisch), more meat and would you like extra meat with that? Not a vegetarian friendly dining environment. But I’ve found a doner kebap place up the street where I can get a tasty veggie wrap by pointing and waving Euros.
Here’s a non-edible gardening question: I have some overgrown yews that I want to cut down to tall stumps and have grow back from the trunks. Yew is one of few evergreens that will regenerate from bare wood. I have seen this done but I’m getting conflicting reports on the best time to decimate them.
Anyone have experience with this?
raven
@Lee Rudolph: Kale is good stirred into navy bean soup.
JPL
@Lee Rudolph: I also have collard greens and they freeze well.
In the south, they cook collard greens for hours but a chef told me he just uses a tad of sugar and a tad of vinegar. The result is wonderfully tasty. My summer garden was a bust but now I have an abundance of sweet potatoes and greens.
@geg6: My mutt must have read the blog last night because he demanded breakfast at 5:30..
raven
@JPL: Lose the sugar, put in soy sauce.
ultraviolet thunder
@raven:
Before I went veggie one of my favorite sides was kale simmered in vegetable broth with white beans and spiced sausage. Escarole also works in that.
JPL
@raven: Do you use vinegar?
raven
@JPL: Yep and smoked turkey necks.
raven
@ultraviolet thunder: Yea!
max
I’m going to trudge all the plants indoors for the second time tonight. And then they all go back out again for two weeks. I also managed to completely shovel/move over both (old and new) compost piles. Next year will be better. I will have built-up planters to stick freeze proof stuff in.
max
[‘I hate red clay.’]
Lee Rudolph
@raven: Most any soup, as far as I can tell. One of the highly edible local specialities around here is Portuguese kale soup. (One of the highly inedible local specialities is the chow mein sandwich. Don’t ask.)
JPL
The NY Times has an article on the former President George W. Bush. After reading it, I was tempted to write a small comment. barf
qwerty42
Down here in Jawja, the morning glories grow like weeds; At the end of summer, I have what looks to be “heavenly blue” in one field and some sort of purple one in the other. Now the vines I plant, on the other hand …
currants
@ultraviolet thunder: Yes! For a heavy pruning like that, during the winter (late winter, early spring even, but before they begin new growth, whenever that time is wherever you live). We did this just last year in Jan or Feb. (regular, shaping-pruning you’d want to do more mid-summer, July-ish, when it’s finished growing)
Aimai
We eat kale–alas store bought–at almost every meal. All year round.
Gindy51
I’d love to eat kale but, like spinach, I am severely allergic/sensitive to it. It’s worse than food poisoning to be honest with you.
As for the garden, it’s been dead for weeks. We in SE IN had a frost/freeze last week and that was it. All the catalpa’s dropped their massive leaves in one day, it was like being in a leaf rain storm. The new puppy loved it and now that the leaves are all dry I can go mow them into mulch!
ultraviolet thunder
@currants:
Thanks. I’d been told early spring by some and mid-summer by others. What you say makes sense, and in Detroit it seems the right time for a hard cut-back will probably be March.
I cut the overgrown bushes back hard 6 or 7 years ago but they’re still just too tall. I need to get them down to 18″ or so and manage their growth. I love yews but these are hogging the sunlight and view of some other plantings.
Funny that I only get interested in landscape projects when I’m 6 time zones away from home.
Amir Khalid
@JPL:
If The NYT prints a story about George Walker Bush, can he read it?
currants
@ultraviolet thunder: That made me laugh–it’s sort of like thinking of all the gardening I’ll do in the spring–when it’s winter and I don’t have to actually break my back digging!
currants
@Lee Rudolph: I had a lot of kale one winter along with a window of time–and a stretch coming up with no spare moments. So I found this process for freezing kale, and it works well, and it’s especially nice to be able to grab a handful out and add it to dinner (or saute it with garlic or shallot and a little stock).
I’m not sure how it would work in recipes where you need to add fresh kale (my daughter makes a fabulous kale-butternut squash risotto, and I’m not sure it would work as well for that).
Raven
Try makin a Sammie with thick toasted bread,sautéed collards and pimento!
Raven
Try makin a Sammie with thick toasted bread,sautéed collards and pimento!
ultraviolet thunder
@currants:
In the winter it’s easy to imagine doing productive things in the yard and garden. But when Spring arrives there’s all the cleanup to do first. By the time I’ve dealt with the dropped branches, sodden leaves and mucky patches of yard I don’t have much enthusiasm for improvements.
currants
@raven: My nephew thinks a goat or two can help keep things tidy…and apparently sheep will take to Japanese knotweed, which could be a real plus for areas with infestations. He said they’ll keep it eaten down, and over time it won’t come back.
debbie
@JPL:
I don’t grow them, but this is what I do with collards. Doesn’t take very long and leftovers are even better:
http://www.thedailygreen.com/healthy-eating/recipes/collard-greens-with-bacon-0112
aimai
I would really love to raise a few goats. But I think my little town wouldn’t allow it. But I would totally love it. Goat milk, goat cheese, goat curry.
Amir Khalid
@aimai:
And what use would you make of goat, er, by-product?
April
I don’t know why, but this has been a great year for mushrooms. I’ve lived here (island in the Puget Sound) for about ten years and never seen anything like it. There’s an outbreak of big red mushrooms with white spots, suitable for hookah-smoking caterpillars, a fascinating orange growth that looks like coral, and every variation possible on the brown/tan/cream cup-on-a-stem. This big convoluted weird growth erupted out of the leaf litter behind my house, about ten inches tall and sponge-like. To my surprise, my neighbor wanted to eat it. He’s still alive, also to my surprise. I have no interest in figuring out which ones will kill you and which ones won’t. I just appreciate the variations nature comes up with.
ultraviolet thunder
@April:
Weird. We had more fungus on the ground in Detroit this year than I’d ever seen in the neighborhood in 14 years there. Usually there’s a couple of weeks in the Spring when you see toadstools and then they vanish. This year they persisted through the summer and are still visible. Puffballs the size of soccer balls. Strange little clusters that look like enoki growing out of cut turf at sidewalk edges. Rings of big white toadstools where trees have been dug out. They were everywhere all year long and people were talking about it.
Oddly, we had fewer morels in the yard than usual, but that varies widely by year.
Elmo
I adore goats. Ours used to come running when I came home from work, for all the world like puppies.
But I will share one piece of goat wisdom, for those of you considering a few. If you want to determine whether a given fence can contain goats, there is a simple test. Throw a bucket of water at the fence. If any water can get through, so can the goats.
This is brought to you as a public service, from one who has spent many, many hours tramping through the woods of East Tennessee, calling for her goats.
OzarkHillbilly
@April:
Probably an anamita variety, the family that gives us the ‘Destroying Angel’ which by the time the first symptoms assert themselves after consumption… It’s too late, you are already dead, your body just doesn’t know it yet.
Possibly a ‘Hen of the Woods’ Very good eating.
My garden is still a mess. Every day the sun shines I have to head over to the house I am building and make the latest changes that the home owners have kind of sort of decided upon, and every other day it rains. Hard freezes are coming and I still need to pour the grade beams for the cold storage room I am building. So today the sun shines and I dig and mix and pour concrete.
sigh…. Better get busy.
Corner Stone
@ultraviolet thunder:
*blushing*
Aww, I’m rather fond of you too, buddy.
Randy P
@ultraviolet thunder:
Ha. I was in Munich for a week early in the summer. Now I love my wurst, but it was even getting to me a little bit. At one little cafe, there was a “wurstsalat” (wurst salad) on the menu and I asked the proprietor if that was a green salad with wurst on it? Oh no, she said, it was [German too complicated for me to sort out]. So I thought, what the hell, I’ll order it anyway and see what comes.
What came was a pile of sliced up wurst, must have been 6 of them, mixed in with a bit of cabbage. Still, I bravely ate all of it.
shelly
Anne, do you make your own goat cheese?
muddy
I know of some folks who rent their goats out by the day or half-day. They bring a portable fence for them. Recently I saw a local farm show on tv that showed how you could teach sheep and goats to eat specific things.
Nettles and other plants have a lot more nutrition than grass, and people are more eager to get rid of them, but the animal doesn’t always know to eat it. So you put some in their favorite feed. Then bring them to the plant and they recognize it. The next generation will be taught by their parents. It was remarkable how picky some of the goats became and they could eradicate certain plants while leaving others alone. And the goats are getting better nutrition at the same time. It’s perfect.
ultraviolet thunder
@Corner Stone:
Long time no ‘see’. I’ve been absent here while traveling but now I’m stationary for a week and can catch up. Back across the Atlantic next Saturday to return to the chaos.
One surprising thing I noticed flying into Germany in daylight: they really DO have a lot of renewable energy sources. Solar cells are all over the roofs of buildings, and there are a lot of windmill power generators. I may be using soshul1st Agenda 21 loving renewable power as I write this!
HeartlandLiberal
Love those goats. I grew up on what was essentially a mini-farm. My father was always a farm boy at heart. This was in Alabama. Until I was 12 we lived on 20 acres in the country. And I helped maintain a herd of coats and a flock of chickens. As oldest son, guess who got to shovel out the hen house twice a year.
We grew a vegetable garden that was probably the size of football field every year. I made a game of milking the goats. The dozen cats would line up and take turns sitting by me below the milking stand, while I squirted milk directly from the goat’s teat into their mouths.
As for my backyard garden, I have most all but the final, frost zapped pepper plants cleared.
The deer figured out I had taken the water scarecrows down because of impending hard frost. I did not want to burst a hose pipe. So they came back, and said, “Oh, look, he has raised beautiful rows of large spinach and Swiss chard for us! Let us snack on them and crop them to the ground.” And so it was.
Oh, well. They ate the tops of the last beets, but I dug up the roots, and have one more good mess of beets to clean and coat with olive oil and roast in the oven.
Still got mustard greens, collards, and a bunch of small late cabbages. I can see that I need to plant the cabbages and the broccoli in July, not August, to get full growth into the fall.
My plan this winter is to do a Thomas Jefferson for the first time, and lay out the entire garden, what will be planted, and the spacing, on three large sheets of graph paper.
Oh, and I still have half the flower bulbs, mostly tulips, left to plant. I planted half just before the first hard frost. Got to get the rest into the ground. Probably planting 150 – 200 bulbs. So hoping for a glorious spring.
Betsy
@JPL: toss it in a saucepan or skillet with a little bacon fat or other pork grease from sausages and wilt t down to nothing, then serve over polenta. Sprinkle red pepper flakes into the bacon grease while cooking the arugula down. On yeah and be sure to use the English word for arugula … Rocket ( for old times sake)
This uses up mounds of overgrown, rank arugula that would be too coarse to use raw in salads
Much like turnip greens
muddy
@JPL: Make a pesto out of it. Freeze as ice cubes.
ultraviolet thunder
Our landscape situation is about to change drastically. The formerly semi-wooded 50′ X 150′ adjacent lot has been scraped flat and a mansionette is going up 5 feet from the edge of our driveway. There will be a 6′ fence the length of the lot line. Not happy about it, but we passed on the chance to buy the land, so, whatever. Capitalism and private property.
Sun exposure will be worse, weather protection will be better, our yard will seem smaller. My wife wants to plant shrubs along our side of the fence. I’ve convinced her to give it a year to see what the changes actually affect, then we’ll decide on what to do on our side. The dog will undoubtedly have an opinion as well.
SectionH
@ultraviolet thunder: Yews will regenerate, up to a point. [fans of the Doctor may insert joke of their choice here, it’s too early for me.] But you can kill them by cutting them down to stumps – which we once did deliberately. I will usually go to great length to not kill most plants, but these were too big to dig up and shaded our entire lower terrace, making it a dank alley. Chopped ’em down, and that was all she wrote. No regrowth at all.
I think if you want to shape them, the better part of valor would be to cut them back overall fairly hard, but not so there’s no green left anywhere. Or follow the rule of dealing with hedge plants in general, which to prune 1/3 of the plant a year as needed for shape/control. It will take longer to get the end result, but you’ll be sure to keep your shrubs alive.
We usually pruned our yews in early spring, just in time for the new growth. Our reasoning was: no point in having the plant’s energy go into branches you’re about to cut off.
SectionH
@ultraviolet thunder: You have morels in your yard? Oh man, I envy you that. Mr S grew up ‘shrooming in central Ohio, and until we moved to SoCal, we still went back to every couple for years for morels.
ultraviolet thunder
@SectionH:
These yews are about 50 years old and really healthy. I cut them back 90% 7 years ago and they filled in within about 3 years. The problem is the greenery is all at the top, blocks an important window and shades the plantings behind. My plan is to take them down to 18″ – 24″ trunks and let them grow back lower by managing the growth. If you saw them off at ground level, they’re done, but if enough wood is left they’ll bud from the trunks.
YellowJournalism
Gardens? We just got a huge dump of snow overnight. I probably won’t see a garden for at least five months now!
ultraviolet thunder
@SectionH:
They randomly appear around the big mature spruce trees, usually on the north side in the spring. Some years I get 5 sometimes 50. Very unpredictable. Apparently it’s common in our neighborhood of older homes and ancient trees. The biggest morel I’ve found was 7″ long. I like them sauteed and added to scrambled eggs. My wife doesn’t like the texture of cooked mushrooms. More for me!
SectionH
@ultraviolet thunder: Yummmmmm.
Sounds like you know what you’re doing with the yews. Sorry if my advice was overly-cautious. I’ve had enough gardening “oopsies” that I do tend to be that way.
Elmo
Mushrooms. Love em, and they grow like crazy here in my Maryland woods, but I am positively terrified to try identifying any for eating. The consequences of a mistake don’t bear thinking about.
How do you shroomers manage it?
opiejeanne
Bad windstorm yesterday in Western Washington. Knocked out our power at 9:30am and we didn’t get it back until 5:30am today. Took out trees and caused outages for more than 200,000 homes and businesses.
At our place it partly dismantled the greenhouse and sailed the wall and roof panels in all directions, and knocked down the pea trellis with the late sugar snap peas, and split our mulberry tree near the top.
Anya
Please take a few minutes and sign this MoveOn.org petition.
CBS News: Stop Reporting Obamacare Myths
aimai
@Amir Khalid: Surely that is what the commons are for? I find goat dung rather endearing but I admit I’d rather see it off in a field somewhere than around my house.
aimai
@Betsy: Oh, yes, this is a great recipe idea. You can also use arugula in place of watercress in a nice waterzooi soup (just good broth, potato, leek, garlic, etc.. and then throw the arugula in at the last minute, wilt it, and whoosh it up with an immersion blender.
Michele Quarton
Well, you have goats we have deer. Once the fence is open, in come the deer, and an occasional wild turkey. We live north of Philadelphia in the country. Michele Q.
ultraviolet thunder
@Michele Quarton:
My dad barricades his garden more thoroughly every year but the deer still manage to get in at least once.
One year they actually climbed up on his front porch and ate the ‘Indian’ corn off of a Thanksgiving decoration on the door.
Man, he really hates those deer.
Randy P
@Michele Quarton: I used to live up the road from this botanical garden. You can’t defeat deer. They spent what must have been hundreds of thousands of dollars on enclosing the gardens in an 8-foot iron fence with an automated gate that would open only to let cars in.
The deer would just hang by the gate and wait for a car to go through, then walk in.
Corner Stone
@ultraviolet thunder: I’ve lost the taste for venison but there’s nothing better than some deer sausage for breakfast on a crisp winter’s morning. Some runny yolk fried eggs and toast with strawberry jam.
All the other meat can be processed for a reasonable price, and then donated.
ultraviolet thunder
@Corner Stone:
My dad is a hunter and it pains me to know how his finger itches when he sees a big lazy doe nosing around his fenced off leaf lettuce. Must be torture to get up in the morning and see 10 white tails bedded down in the side yard.
Regarding gardening, I used to cut the stalks off of our many yuccas when the flowers dropped but I neglected that one year and found that the woodpeckers riddled the stalks with holes to get at the bugs infesting the dead material. Now I leave them up for the birds.
In the Detroit area we have Emerald Ash Borers killing all of our ash trees. A lot of trees are being cut and replaced but we’ve had a population boom of woodpeckers due to the plentiful borer grubs.
StringOnAStick
@HeartlandLiberal: Sounds lovely, now and next spring!
I’d like to add a hearty “yes!” to the idea of planning a veggie garden out on paper over the winter; it makes a HUGE difference, plus its fun to do in the middle of winter when the seed catalogs start arriving. When I was a landscaper’s assistant in the early 90’s (thanks to the recession and my MS in geology being basically worthless), I learned that planning on paper is something even the pros do, veggies or perennials. That job taught me so much about landscaping even though I’d been a garden junkie since I was a child. I’ve leveraged it recently into doing the occasional xeriscape (low water use for dry climates) design for folks, more for the fun of having a new space to design for since mine is pretty much complete now (and for a little $ here and there).
Xeriscape design requires experience and thought because the local micro- and sub-micro-niches really matter if you want to end up with something that looks nice, where one thing doesn’t over run everything else, and you don’t want to have to treat certain things to extra water. When we bought our house, the backyard was a foot of potting soil on bedrock, planted with half xeric plants, half water hungry ones, and lots of weeds enjoying the soaker hoses. I kept the lavendars, gave away the water-suckers, replaced the soaker hoses with a drip system, and got serious about planting deer- and elk-proof plants (salvias and agastaches, plus native grasses). Bringing in 5 yards of pea gravel mulch was the biggest effort since no wheelbarrow would fit (I used a hand truck and 5 gallon buckets). The garden is mostly what I’d hoped for and I may do 1 or 2 hours of weeding over the whole season since the drip system puts the water where it needs to be.
handsmile
@Corner Stone:
I thought you lived in Austin. What the hell would you know about a “crisp winter’s morning”? Sheesh. Do love venison sausage myself, though it’s a rare enough sighting here in the urban hellhole.
@ultraviolet thunder:
I had wondered about your absence hereabouts. Always enjoy reading your commentary and your dispatches from airport lounges and far-flung hotel rooms.
Also too, I do hope some ‘shroom ‘shpert answers Elmo’s question above (#54). A love and a fear I have as well.
opiejeanne
Before the storm we have been clearing out the raised beds as the vegetables finish up for the year, and tarping each one to keep the cleanup in the spring to a minimum. Weeding the beds before you can do anything with them is not as much fun as it might seem.
Yatsuno
@Elmo: My cousin studied mycology in college, and she’s an avid forager. She never goes without a solid guidebook that shows the subtler differences in the mushrooms since one that looks fine can look very close to a poisonous one. She came back with a huge mess of chanterlles. Didn’t even save me any.
ultraviolet thunder
@handsmile:
Thanks. I’ve missed this ‘place’ but work and travel have soaked up all of my time. I lurk & read but commenting from an iPhone standing on a ladder in a factory is awkward.
Friday I got abruptly flung about as far as possible and I’m in Deutschland for a week or so. Oddly, this is when I have time to catch up on reading because there’s little else to do.
I’d like to drop a plug for an old friend of the blog who mysteriously disappeared when Ultraviolet Thunder made his debut.
fuckwit
@handsmile: when i lived in dallas, i remember days, around this time of yesr, last week of oct or first week of nov, where in 1 day the weather went from 100 degrees in the shade and 100% humidity to under freezing bone dry and frost on the ground. boom, just like that. no fall, directly from summer to winter
Corner Stone
@handsmile: Even worse, I live in The Greater Houston Metro Area. So crisp winter morns are few and freakin’ far between!
But please notice I did not say, “Balls retracting into your stomach level of cold”.
IMO, “crisp” means you don’t get frostbite by stepping outside.
Just Some Fuckhead
I call bullshit on this commenter Hafabee. You can’t be called a commenter if you never comment.
currants
@ultraviolet thunder: Ross in Detroit!! I know you from the garden threads. Glad to make your (new nym) acquaintance (again).