Thank you, commentor No One of Consequence:
I don’t really know what I’m doing. But with the advent of Mexico tariffs decimating produce availability and pricing (or so I thought at the time), the missus and I determined that I should put in a garden.
Newer home, so land is 1-2 inches of topsoil and then straight to clay. So putting one in the ground would take considerable effort. Excavating clay is work for powered tools and people who know what they are doing.
So, I found some cheap (relatively) raised beds from Tractor Supply Co, and ordered four. Then I ordered three tons of garden mix soil from a local landscape provider, and that I moved all by hand and wheelbarrow into the four containers and spare garbage cans in the garage. Nice pre-screened stuff, that I wanted to keep dry for landscaping use.
Anyway, got those in, and my wife had ordered a great deal of seed from a place in California. I started to put in a garden. Growing from seeds kind of sucks. BUT I did have some success.
Bok Choi, the larger leafy green in the images, took off and is going well, but obviously crowding out some of the stuff I had planted alongside: onions, basil, carrots. SO I need to thin things, and harvest some of the overgrowth. Trying to do square foot gardening, but next year I will more carefully plot out where I plant things.
The star of the year so far has been the Tat Soi. That is the smaller dark green leafy in the images. The spinach you can spot because it has bolted and the shapes of the leaves have gone from round to arrowhead shaped. Tat soi is the schniz. It tastes like a mix between spinach and kale, much closer to spinach than kale (almost imperceptible bite). The yield on this plant has been incredible though. I am still harvesting leaves off of the first row I started to take. It really is remarkable. Cannot recommend highly enough.
Lighter lime green leafy is iceberg lettuce, which my son wanted for burgers. Couple of marigolds in the mix to ward off some insects.
The last container was saved (and now being planted) with the sweet potato vines I have been trying to start. This is a new one on me, sinking a whole tuber on its side, halfway in soil in a clear plastic container, and then needing 6-8 weeks for the magic to happen. Managed to get some starts off of the experiment. ost are still alive, as it has been a few days, and I think those will produce leaves for eating within the next 2- 3 weeks.
What’s going on in your gardens, this week?
War for Ukraine Day 1,192: The Russian Bombardments Continue
eclare
Three tons? Wow! Your raised beds look great. I’ve never heard of Tat Soi, I’ll have to look for it at the Asian market near me.
satby
That’s an impressive first effort! Looks great. I also have never heard of Tat Soi, but it sounds like something I would like very much, so I’m going to look for some next year too.
Jeffg166
Very nice garden.
I picked, pitted and froze two quarts of sour cherries yesterday. More will get picked today and during the next week. I will be so tired of pitting cherries when this year’s crop is done.
Gloria DryGarden
Really great looking bok Choi and tatsoi. Do you have to water them every day? I’ve had no luck with them.
what kind of tomatoes are you growing? When I grow indeterminates, i sometimes put them as close as 18”, but I try for 2 feet.
im way behind on planting things, but I’m excited I found pineapple tomatillo seedlings to grow on. I’ve been looking for 4 years, no one had them; I cut back on tomatoes to leave room for them. We’ll see how this goes.
what does one do with sweet potato leaves?
satby
In my garden, rain while I was gone and continued cool temperatures resulted in an explosion of grass and weeds. Got the grass mowed, will try to get the grass out of my iris bed today. Early iris are blooming and so are the roses and peonies. But hot weather tomorrow, and smoke from Canadian wildfires are rolling in now and my asthma has been bad, so I’m hoping I get a few things done today before I need to just stay inside.
JoyceH
Wait – you can eat sweet potato greens?!
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
satby
@JoyceH: yes, I guess you can! I never knew that either.
Princess
Tat so is delicious and grows easily but when planted in the ground I found pests loved it too. The raised bed surely helps.
MazeDancer
Well done! Most inspirational.
As my traveling neighbor asked me to water her sweet potato start, and, I, too, had never heard of eating the leaves, went out and sampled one.
Stick with the tastsoi.
tobie
What gorgeous beds! You will have scrumptious greens this summer! I got tired of fighting the rabbits and deer, so I elevated my beds and fenced them. I got lazy with two of the three and filled them with top soil instead of more nutrition rich dirt. boy, does mid-Atlantic top soil suck. Still the tomatoes are growing and the eggplant seems to have settled in. The peppers are struggling. In the good bed, I find myself now with 10 cauliflower plants. I guess I’ll be freezing a bunch for the winter.
HinTN
@tobie:
Goodness gracious, NO! Just eat them fresh. Steam them lightly, eat them raw in salads or with dip, but don’t destroy them for later. Please
JAM
The raised beds look great. I am using grow bags for my vegetables this year, just tomatoes, peppers and watermelons.
narya
@HinTN: I roast and THEN freeze cauliflower, and it’s quite tasty that way! Plus, quick veggie side when I need one. The other thing I did last time was shred (using the shredding disk on the food processor, I think) the stalks, roasted that a bit, and, ta-da!, cauliflower “rice.
ETA, congrats on the lovely raised beds! Sounds like a lot of work that is paying off!
H.E.Wolf
The mention of sweet potatoes reminded me of George Washington Carver.
https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver/carver-sweet-potato-products
https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/ipd/carver/
tobie
@HinTN: I will do my best to eat as many cauliflowrs as I can. The problem is my veggie patch feeds six and hubs and I are only two. I will give to friends. That’s the best thing I can do with nature’s bounty.
Kristine
Those are nice beds!
We’re officially in the “Moderate Drought” category here in NE Illinois, but you wouldn’t know it from the way the yard looks. The astilbes especially have loved the cool spring—foliage is dense and the blooms are forming. Hosta have exploded. All the volunteers—the goldenrod, boneset, common ninebark—look happy.
I’ve spent the last week doing the cleanup I should have handled weeks ago. I need to reclaim a planting site in the front yard from encroaching grass and sort out the shade garden, which is overgrown in places.
But today will be spent moving some milkweed to the pollinator garden and cutting down stuff growing along and through the fence.
No One of Consequence
Good morning everyone, and thank you very kindly to Anne Laurie for posting these. One of the shots of the sweet potato starts didn’t make it, and no worries, I provided prolly too many images/words. Not a back-handed compliment, Anne-Laurie, I really do appreciate it! I will also attempt to answer the questions/comments here:
Thank you for the kind words. Moving the dirt was something I definitely felt the day after.
Again, I too had not heard of Tat Soi before — but I cannot recommend it highly enough. So, so good. I just substitute it for everywhere I used spinach before. For example, last night I cooked up some Spinach Quesadillas, but substituted cut Bok Choi and Tat Sri for the spinach. Changed the flavor of the dish considerably, but the missus says it was some of the best quesas she had had before.
I do water the garden everyday unless it has got rain. I am not going to have fully-formed Napa cabbages from the bok choi, but it is REALLY yielding fantastic leaves.
The tomato plants are all cherry toms. I’m not a big straight tomato fan, but I do love guacamole, and figured these would be a decent sub for Romas, and they would work better in salads.
Sweet potato leaves are a new one on me. My wife is from Taiwan, and her mother is a fantastic cook. (Sadly my wife has no interest.) So, A-mah should have more than a couple sweet potato leaves recipes. You cook the leaves, NOT the stems, but I don’t know about how exactly it’s done yet. Waiting on the leaves to show up to learn. Incidentally, out of about 14 starts, it looks like 12 of them will be viable already.
Now, early-mid-season lessons learned:
Onions and basil prolly will be ok to plant next to each other, but next year, I need to watch the leafy green plantings to they do not overshadow and crowd out what is next to them. Thinking next year a whole container of just bok choi and tat soi, and let them fight it out.
Starting from seed works fine on some crops, but poorly on others. I think there is much to be said for starting seeds indoors, and then transplanting. That said, timing will be tricky, because it is more likely than not, if you start seeds indoors, that the lack of enough lumens will result in leggy young plants that may not do as well as they would had you just started from seed. Alas, mid-Iowa isn’t something you can count on for the ‘last’ frost. This spring, last frost was kind of early, and we have had a nice and relatively moist Spring.
Thanks again everyone, I’ll try to update the garden news through the growing season.
-NOoC
SH
@H.E.Wolf: Did Carver’s museum entries get removed and then put back? Our gov is crazy!
No One of Consequence
@H.E.Wolf: Loves me some Professor Carver. Bad ass, through and through. Proud to have gone to ISU and taken classes in the Carver building. Undersung hero, imho. The brain on that guy.
-NOoC
Edited to add: I’ll pass along any good recipe(s) that I get from my mother-in-law. Oh, also that I found a source for pickled garlic at my local asian grocery. That’s used more than I realized in quite a few dishes in Vietnamese and some Taiwanese (chinese?) use pickled garlic instead of fresh. Eating it pickled (to me) yields the garlic taste without any of the bite at all. I fish out a clove and put one on a triscuit and eat 2 or 3 like that. Great way to get a daily dose of garlic and not bowl everyone over with your exhalatinous ‘Why helllllloooooooooo….’
-NOoC
Trivia Man
My lettuce is coming in, do i just cut off leaves as needed? Will it just produce all summer?
No One of Consequence
@Trivia Man: That’s my approach. If you’ve the time and patience, try to select strategically, to ‘thin’ the row. The more sunlight the individual plants get via their leaves affect growth of the overall plant, so you can ‘thin’ individual plants from the outside in (taking outer leaves from many single plants) or you can thin by taking one entire lettuce plant at a time, trying to space your harvesting out to maximize sunlight to other lettuce plants.
Does that help?
-NOoC
ETA: as things get hotter, salad greens (most) will start to bolt. At that point, the plant switches over from growth mode to reproduce mode. Once that happens, many greens will become more bitter, and produce far less leafy material as the plant switches its energy expenditure to reproductive efforts (growing flowers for the forming of seed most times).
Trivia Man
@No One of Consequence: very helpful. Can i plant new seeds all summer to replace the plants i harvest?
sempronia
ah, Taiwanese relatives. I was wondering if someone in your household was interested in Chinese home cooking. Tat soi and sweet potato leaves are common, humble vegetables. You don’t see sweet potato leaves much in the markets because people grow them at home. Sweet potatoes are a starvation food – the term “捱蕃薯” means to tough it out through hard times and literally means to stretch your diet with sweet potatoes. This is why my mom is always so amused when we want sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving; it’s starvation food, not holiday food. If you’re picking tat soi at a market, choose short fat plants. The taller they are, the stringier the stalks.
Randal Sexton
I am determined to get tomatoes and pimenton-padrons this year so my wife ordered and we assembled this, on a super windy day, pretty challenging. For folks who build their own boxes – the way I do it makes it easier to shovel in them, no bits of wood for the shovel to bump into. : greenhouse
TerryC
Thank you all for your growing stories.
My focus has been on planting trees not annuals, but I am trying a few veggies and herbs this year. It is ironic that I have been so successful at planting trees that I have little sunny space anywhere close to the house, and the further away I go from the house (Zone 1) the more devastating the deer will be. I have a couple of porch tomatoes and have strewn squash seeds of all kinds all over the place. We shall see.
Have put in several hundred new tree babies this year, mostly bald cypress, sycamore, and a dozen different varieties of oak but also some blueberries, paw paws, and red mulberries.
If you know about “mast years” then you will know that since last year was a mast year for black cherry I have hundreds of cherry babies popping up all over. If I don’t mind where they are, they stay. If I want them somewhere else I move them. I’ve so far marked almost 400 tree babies this year with colorful flags. I just walk around with a handful of flags looking at the ground.
WaterGirl
Impressive!
WaterGirl
@TerryC: I have never heard of mast years. Very interesting!
You must have a large property.
Gvg
My area of Florida is having a very dry spring and fall was too. I have discovered my mulch and soil have dried and crusted and water is having a hard time getting thru so I have been doing a bunch of fluffing and scruffing. I have also been watering with a bit of soap sometimes. I can’t wait for the summer rains to start. Things are growing anyway. I have to mow all the time now.
I found this site on Iowa https://yardandgarden.extension.iastate.edu/ scroll to the bottom and look at the resources. There is a bunch of information in the publications. It’s from their agricultural extension services master gardener program. My mother is a Florida master gardener so I went looking for an Iowa version since you said you were a new gardener. Not all states have such programs, but they are a good resource.
H.E.Wolf
@SH:
No idea if the current admin has tried to suppress Carver’s accomplishments, or not.
Be that as it may: One of the many reasons for opposing book bans is that the books that children read can make a lifelong impression. I was introduced to George Washington Carver (and Mary McLeod Bethune, and other luminaries) in grade school, from a kids’ biographical book series in our church library.
1,000 flouncing lurkers (was fidelioscabinet)
@No One of Consequence: Sweet potatoes are great at breaking up clay. Also, since you can root them inside in water, they can be jumpstarted that way.
Grumpy Old Railroader
Love the raised garden beds! But of course being located in the great Sacramento Valley with the long, hot and dry summers, a raised bed only sun bakes your plant roots. Raised beds are wonderful where it rains in the summer, but are a no-no in hot dry climates**.
**Certain conditions apply. If your raised bed has a large surface area and you don’t plant anywhere near the edge of the bed, then it may work out
Gloria DryGarden
@tobie: your local food banks thank you for the extra produce.
No One of Consequence
@Trivia Man: Well, in my experience (limited) most salad greens are cool weather crops. Once the heat of summer sets in, they may not fair as well. If you plant seeds going for the second crop, you may find tougher goings. I put in a new Tat Soi seeding last week, and the plants are already up and working, so probably couple of weeks away from harvestable leaves.
For the lettuces, might as well give it a shot, if you’ve the space. Worse comes to worst, it will start bolting quickly, which means you will have to be on top of it to get good leaves before they start getting more bitter.
Let us know how it goes!
-NOoC
No One of Consequence
@sempronia:
Awesome. It is a pity that Ah mah cannot visit. She’d cook up a storm with my garden, I bet. But we’d still need a lot of supplementals. Understandable the variety and freshness of the food in Taiwan. Their morning markets feature a wealth of produce of all kinds, most of it harvested a mere few hours ago. (Not many people in Taiwan have the space or ability to have their own gardens. With my experiences in morning markets there in Taipei and Kaoshung, you really don’t need them. The produce there is fresh, relatively cheap, and as varied as I have seen any farmer’s market anywhere.)
-NOoC
No One of Consequence
@TerryC: Fantastic! I lack the grounds for a proper go at DIY forestry. I’ve planted something like 15 trees on this property. My wife (bless her heart) has enabled the death of most of them. However, lessons were learned. The latest batch includes four redbuds and a Hoopsi cultivar of Colorado Blue Spruce.
Rock on with your tree plantings. Delayed gratification, indeed, but whomever (hopefully you!) enjoys the shade/color/texture/benefit, will be happy you did.
-NOoC
No One of Consequence
@Gvg: Many thanks. I was not aware of that online resource, but that is my alma mater. ISU has a couple of colleges that benefit citizens immensely, though not widely known. One is our Horticultural school, and the other is just the whole Ag department. I roomed with a Botanist in school, so I picked up more than I realized in general conversations.
I’ll use that link though, so thank you!
-NOoC
No One of Consequence
@1,000 flouncing lurkers (was fidelioscabinet): Did not know this, but will try to play some in the flower garden once I have the problem of too many in the containers.
Another way to slowly break up clay is to add pelletized gypsum with your lawn treatment. It take a lot, and a lot of applications, but over time, you can eke out more topsoil for your roots.
Ymmv,
-NOoC
No One of Consequence
@Grumpy Old Railroader: I have a friend in Bishop. Might be different enough climate there, but they do raised beds for some greens, and they put a small, white partition in front and on the west sides of their beds. This keeps their containers sides in shade, and their being separate from the container doesn’t transfer any thermal energy to the frame. They also have timed drip and misting irrigation rigged onto them.
Not sure if something like that would work in your situation or not.
-NOoC
Gvg
@No One of Consequence: only certain kinds of clay, not all. Look up if the soils in your area are that kind. It’s usually western low rainfall areas. Plant roots of certain kinds are better. There are certain kinds of cover crops that work such as daikon radishes, the ones that grow really long, like 2 feet and others. I think the Prairie Moon nursery in Wisconsin’s website has a bunch of info on that. I know the prairie restoration movement and the food forest community have a lot of information on that. If you google those areas you should find more
look up clay buster plants too, perhaps with your state added so you get local plants.
H.E.Wolf
This is so cool! Thanks for mentioning your connection with Carver. Classes in a named building definitely count. :)
No One of Consequence
@H.E.Wolf: Carver Hall in my day had a lot of math classes taught in it. College calculus kicked my ass, so going there was a dread for me until I moved to Journalism from Engineering. ;)
I learned about GWC in grade school from Mrs. Connors. She had me studying the legends during Black History Month. For a little white Iowa kid who meant well, I had a deficit of appreciation. Well, she fixed that right up. Who came out the other side of those lessons has a tremendous admiration for George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglas, and perhaps most of all Thurgood Marshall.
-NOoC
No One of Consequence
@Gvg: Most of my land is covered by my lawn. I’m letting the ditches go native, and the municipality control/mow what I lack the equipment to do myself.
As such, I haven’t needed to try the sweet potato clay break up possibilities. I DO however, have a flower garden that I intend to try this in there with spare plants.
I’ll let you know what I find out. I’m keen to try it.
-NOoC
Gloria DryGarden
@No One of Consequence: I fight clay where I live. I can dig 6 inches down, with effort, but double digging- which has become outdated since permaculture, lasagne gardening, and knowledge about the importance of mycelium- was a labor of jumping on a pitchfork to force the tines deeper in, and poke holes through that clay.
I sometimes will grow radishes or daikon , or carrots, and then leave them in, to create organic matter and loosen the clay. There are carrots that are better in tough clay. Carrots btw take longer to germinate than radishes. When it’s warmer, and I plant late, I’ve been known to cover my planted rows w cardboard for shade/cool/ moisture, and just check when the germination time is, uncover after things sprout.
Gloria DryGarden
I have a question about leafy greens and diet. Basically I’m wondering what’s left to eat if I eliminate some things that may be “Bad” for me. I’ve been following some seminars on reversing thyroid and blood sugar issues, and the doctor says crucifers can be goitrogens, slow down your thyroid. Spinach and its relatives can be high in oxalates, which aren’t so great. And then the acupuncture clinic discourages me from eating lettuce, because uncooked greens, like lettuce, are “Damp” which covers a lot of the symptoms I’m dealing with. So what’s left if I take away lettuce, and spinach-beets-chard- wild soinach, and the whole broccoli tatsoi Brussels sprouts kale turnip greens family?
I mean for non starchy vegetables?
I eat all that, because I can’t quite manage on celery and green onions and cilantro… and parsley (bleah). It’s tricky enough just to get myself to eat more vegetables, and to eat them first to make blood sugar stay even.
The doctor teaching about reversing thyroid is not full of shit, she’s reversed her own overweight and thyroid issues, and I applied her info and turned back diabetes in a month.
Ideas?
No One of Consequence
@Gloria DryGarden: Imma try your cardboard trick next early spring for sure. I wasn’t ready this year. Next year I intend to be in a better position.
As for your leafy greens question, boy I dunno. If mustard greens are a part of your no go list, then Tat Soi would be out I would guess.
I’ll let you know what I find out about sweet potato leaves, but I doubt their equivalence to the leafy greens which typically have more nutrients than vine leaves. (To my knowledge, which is admittedly limited.)
-NOoC
Gloria DryGarden
@No One of Consequence: so get the deets for the cardboard trick.. and dig out the perennial weeds, as much as you can. Just to get a jump on them; they can ruin your life.
cardboard, manure, veggie scraps that the microbes will break down for you, more layers, mown grass, greens, browns, nutrient things like a cover crop. Start gathering stuff, or finding a place to hold it until you’re ready. You really could plant radishes, right now, over an area, cover with the depth of soil or manure needed, water, wait a week. They’ll pierce the ground for you. You could do it in fall, so by spring you can plant in it. A lot of people do their lasagne garden like a barn raising, bring in 5 friends, order a truckload of cow manure, and set it all up in a day. Many hands make light work.
lighter, anyway.
another trick for clay, is post hole composting. Dig a small hole. Shove it full of veggie scraps, cover with an inch of dirt. Unless the critters give you trouble, this works well, lasts about a year, maybe two. If critters, just put a rock on it, or a pot of dirt. The worms will come, if you have them, only takes 2-3 months for nature to do the thing.
As to the greens, well, until I get a better idea, I’ll eat it all, but in rotation.. it’s those three families, or amaranth leaves and umbellifera things like cilantro, dill, ( celery) and mint things like sage and basil. Really everything else is a crucifer, or spinach family with oxalates, even the wild things. Ok maybe violet and pansy flowers. I just don’t see a whole salad from herbs and flowers and green beans. I could cook romaine into a Chinese ginger chicken stir fry, it works well, but then I’ve run out of green veggies. Except for seaweed. One serving of nori is enough in a day. I like broccoli and napa, tatsoi, spinach, I like them. Dang it.
No One of Consequence
@Gloria DryGarden: Dandelion leaves? (I know, I’m reaching.)