The flavor of frost

This is a gorgeous time of year, the temperatures have cooled off, and the mosquitoes, blackflies, biting midges, deerflies, and horseflies have disappeared with the heat, which makes a huge difference in our ability to enjoy the garden, and outdoor activities. We even had our first stargaze in quite a few months, dreaming up at the night sky without being eaten alive!

We did have our first major frost on September 9th, dawn broke to a dusting of fine white frost over the garden and fields. But we were prepared, and had covered the tender crops: peppers, tomatoes, ground cherries, a late basil crop, and even a pair of flowering fennel plants, hoping for some fennel seed. The frost spelled the end for the winter squash, pumpkin and cucumber vines, but the zucchini bushes showed real vigor, only burning the tallest leaves and not damaging the crown or small fruits. The last bean crop was also frosted, so we harvested the last of the green beans, and have been feasting on them, getting our fill of the fresh crop knowing it will be canned or fermented from now on.

The frost also marked the end of our market garden crops, which is more of a relief than a disappointment, we did as well as we could this year, and it is good to be able to focus all of our energies on our own harvest and winter preparation.

The bulk of our tomatoes, tomatillos and ground cherries are just ripening now, so we will keep them protected from frost for another 3-4 weeks before bringing in the remaining green fruits to ripen indoors. So my tomato sauce, salsa and chutney canning fest has begun. I'm also drying some ground cherries, they make nice little "raisins" for baked goods, with that unique pineapple flavor.
The sunflowers have indeed bloomed in time to make seeds, I always forget how frost hardy they are. We are going to experiment with de-hulling the seeds this fall/winter.

My own accidental hybrid "Sweet Curry" kabocha type winter squash, ripening in the dappled shade of the frosted vines. These will have to be brought in before the next frost, without the sheltering umbrella of leaves, the squash fruits would be damaged by a frost.

The popcorn is ready to harvest, the kernels mostly dried on the cob. I husk them right away, then store them in a large onion bag and let them continue drying for a few weeks before shelling the cobs.

A late summer fruit, Wild Raisins are ripening. They have a date-like flavor, but also like dates, have an unfortunate pit. My favorite way of making use of these delicious and abundant fruits is to put them through a food mill raw, and dry them as a fruit leather, they need no sugar this way. The pulp is also good added to applesauce, making an interesting applesauce variation.

Of course, the local songbird population is also fond of these sweet fruits. This female Common Yellowthroat, of the wood warbler family, foraged in the same bush.

I got this lucky shot some time later.

I try to keep a profusion of late summer and fall flowers available for the insects. These flowering lettuce bushes would normally be a part of my seed saving regime, but we are going to start over with regionally appropriate seed varieties in our next garden, somewhere on the West coast, so these flowers are just for the bees. The last pollen producing flowers in the garden are the hardy broccoli flowers, I always leave the small side shoots to go to flower, they continue to bloom and attract bumble bees even after the ground starts to freeze, well into November, even early December.

A fennel flower, on it's way to seed, I hope. I started these fennel plants in March this year, determined to get some fennel seed from these slow-pokes, we'll see.

The last of the Coriander flowers, my absolute favorite flower in the garden, they make a delicate bouquet all of their own.

It's amazing that they become such homely clusters, which is likewise, one of my favorite spices. We're curry-aholics, and if you've never tried coriander in baked goods, replace it with cinnamon in a spiced cookie recipe for a nice delight.

Too much beauty

There's just too much beauty in the garden, I simply must share...

Syriphid Fly eating the nectar of a Calendula Flower.

Northern Leopard Frog, Rana Pipiens, this wet and soggy summer has been great for the frogs, never seen so many frogs and toads in the garden. Even found a young Wood Frog in the Zucchini. Plenty of bugs and slugs for them to eat this year.

Syriphid Fly tasting a Red Clover blossom. It's a great year for these Syriphid Flies too, there's dozens in the garden, the larva are predatious, often of aphids and other small soft bodied insects, but the adults are pure nectar eaters. And red clover is one sweet source of nectar. I use it as a natural sweetener in herbal teas.

Unidentified big green caterpillar.

Grass Skipper resting on the Betony blossoms.

Ichneumon wasp tasting the Carrot flower nectar, an important parasitoid in the gallery of natural enemies in the garden.

Marigold bloom.

Skullcap flower spikes. A hardy perennial herb useful to support a good night's sleep, and also a graceful flower in the garden landscape.

Grasshopper in the alfalfa. I've let my alfalfa bushes go to seed, after harvesting an early cut of leaves for herbal teas. The seeds for sprouting will be a great store of live food on our Winter menu. I just love the complement of colors in this image, the lavenders on the grasshopper highlighted by the alfalfa blossoms, the picture is a pallette of pastels.

The mullein flower stalks do not fail to attract the highest concentration of bumble bees, day after day. And the bees sure are stocking up on pollen from this prolific bloomer. Not only do they fill their leg pouches with rich golden pollen, but their fuzzy bums get covered in the stuff. Pollination in action.

Blooming

I do love vegetable flowers, and watching them unfold gives me more than an aesthetic satisfaction because the edible fruits are soon to follow.

We have potato flowers in varying shades from white to pink to lavender to blue, depending on the variety and corresponding with the color of the potato skin. As soon as these flowers begin to die back, I can begin to excavate some of the treasure trove beneath.
Pea flowers are short lived and delicate creatures. This time of year, the pods seem to grow by inches straight out of the newly opened blossoms.
Bean flowers remind me of orchids, perhaps the homely cousin, but beautiful still. And they continue to flower as young bean pods form, promising a reliable harvest, enough to put away for winter.

Pumpkin and squash flowers glow like lanterns in the bare spring garden, and not surprisingly, they never fail to attract interesting insects for nectar, prey or shelter.

Some flowers are a harvest in themselves, brightening and enlivening salads or garnishing meals. These Nasturtiums have a nearly addictive peppery tang.

And some vegetable flower are only ever seen in the seed saving garden. This globe of tiny onion flowers is wrapped in paper like the bulb below.
But for pure show, no vegetable flower can compete with the infinite variety of plants, bred and shared generation after generation, for the simple delight and surprising complexity of it's flower. Marigolds, Cosmos, Calendula and Hollyhocks have found gaps and corners in our vegetable garden, my selection based on their hardiness and ease of growing.

But nothing brings more insects to the garden than the homely flowers of dill, cilantro, caraway and carrot.

A Cutworm Fence: protecting row crops from cutworm damage

Putting physical barriers, such as tin-foil or paper collars, around transplants is a common method of controlling cutworm damage. As immature larvae, especially in large numbers, the cutworms prefer small emerging seedlings, the kinds of row crops usually directly seeded into the garden. As the cutworms grow larger, they correspondingly prefer larger stems, including transplants which can easily be protected with collars or other physical barriers such as toothpicks or small nails stuck into the soil next to the stem.

To protect our emerging seedlings, such as carrots, parsnips, beets, greens and herbs, we built a cutworm fence as a physical barrier. We dug a 4 inch trench around the area, and drove small posts into the ground every 10-15 feet. A number of different materials could be used for the fence: plastic, feed bags, fabric, anything that will not let the cutworm pass through. We happen to have a large roll of woven fabric, similar to row cover, but in the future we would prefer heavy plastic (like the kind mini-homes are wrapped in, and can be diverted from the waste stream) because it is slick and more durable in the soil. The fabric was stapled to the posts, holding it taut to keep from sagging. It stretches 4 inches below the soil, and 6 inches above.

The cutworms can climb a short way onto the plant, but after observing them in our tin collection can, they cannot climb a vertical surface above 2-3 inches. And although they do burrow in the soil to feed, we have not seen any below 2-3 inches deep, and they do not travel below the soil.

We have observed that the cutworms quickly move from crop to crop within the garden. After we tilled under a heavily damaged crop of beet seedlings infested with cutworms, we noticed, only days later, that no cutworms could be found in the soil where no food was present. Therefore, we can easily exclude them from ground where we intend to sow direct seeded row crops by fallowing the ground in the spring, and constructing a cutworm fence prior to planting.

Since this barrier was erected after planting, we carefully cultivated the area and removed any cutworms we found, including disturbing the soil around the base of each plant by hand. We had been doing this regularly to control the population of cutworms in the garden, but this time, we can be sure that more will not move in from other areas of the garden. Most of the rest of the garden crops are either too large to cut (such as the beans and peas), or protected by nails along the stems (such as the transplants).

Cutworms travel above ground, mostly during the night, and can cover some distance searching for food. Though it does make them vulnerable to predators such as our fat and happy American Toad. We are currently building a small toad pool in the garden to encourage them to breed here.
The morning after we put up the cutworm fence, we were happy to discover very little damage overnight. The herbs were untouched, and only a few carrot and parsnip leaves had been cut, exposing the location of the remaining cutworms. Thank goodness, it seems that my war with the cutworms is drawing to an end. Practicing organic and ecological gardening means out-smarting, and out-maneuvering pests and diseases. I tend to be of the disposition to lock horns and butt heads directly with my pest-sized opponent, but this time it was simply wearing me down. So I learned an important lesson in gardening: to be nimble and adaptable in technique and method, to use my intellect instead of sheer determination and will-power. Determination got me through the steep beginner's learning curve, but now that I've got a few seasons under my belt, it's time to sharpen my tools and think like a gardener!
Other-where's in the garden, the perennial herb garden is flourishing, providing my first cut of Oregano, Thyme, Catnip and Alfalfa to dry for winter use.
We are also welcoming the butterflies back to the North. Including this White Admiral,

and a Monarch look-a-like: the Eastern Viceroy.

Garden Tour

My how the garden grows! Rainbow after a thunder shower only 10 days ago...

The view from the kitchen table this morning. There's a lot of bare ground in the foreground, that's where the cutworms have done the most damage, even getting into the herb beds. I was pretty surprised to see them cut herbs like savory, dill, cilantro, parsley, fennel, anise, basil, calendula, and poppy flowers seem to be a favorite treat of theirs. I removed all of the onion seedlings from the middle bed and will transplant them back into clean ground. We are working on constructing cutworm fences around the seed beds. They can climb, but not very high on slick vertical surfaces. I'll post more on the fences when we have them constructed and tested.

Here's another angle of the herb, greens and roots beds. We lost all of the beets, turnips, chard, spinach, direct seeded lettuce/mesculun, and a few plantings of carrots and parsnips are still struggling along. I scout the mature lettuce bed regularly, they only cut of the outer leaves of the larger lettuces, revealing their presence. Thank goodness there is only one cycle of cutworms per year, and it is coming to an end in a few weeks. So we will still have time for some later plantings of carrots, beets, greens and herbs.

On the left is the first planting of carrots and parsnips, they emerged before the cutworms, and got a bit of a head start. Still, the patches show the damage they have done. To the right, is the potato patch, and they are doing great this year, just starting to flower. The Potato Beetle damage is down to a minimum this year, we are finding only about 5 adults a day, up to 20 on windy days when they blow in from potato farms. To the right of the potatoes, the mulched area, a row of cukes, zukes, and winter squash beginning to flower. And to the right of the vines, my plot of small grains and seeds: popcorn, sunflower, amaranth, millet, quinoa, poppy seed, hulless oats. The cutworms have been working their way down the grains as well, and we are just starting to weed in there, so I'm self-consciously omitting a picture of them! I plan to do a post on these small grains and seeds as they mature.

This is my wild, overgrown perennial/biennial herb bed. I underestimated the amount of room the perennials would need in their second year. I left some biennials (caraway, parsley, mullein and chicory) to go to seed in the same bed, so next year the nettle, alfalfa and comfrey will have enough room to expand.

A quarter acre plot of Hard Red Spring Wheat for bread baking, and about 1500 row feet of dry peas, to harvest for the chicken's winter feed. On the right you can just see the newly worked ground, 3/4 acre, for planting grains next year, with the market peas and beans moving into this grain plot. To the left of this picture is about 2000 sq ft of millet (not worth picturing as it is just emerging), to be harvested for chicken feed.

In the lower garden, our green beans and baking beans, as well as our dry peas and shelling peas. As well as a row of Naked Seeded Pumpkins between the peas. We got a few inches of rain this week, warm nights, and a hot sunny day today, so everything is growing by inches.

Next to them, the brassicas and ground cherries. The Flea Beetles never did make it down to the transplants, after giving my turnips and radishes a hard time. And now I can hardly find a Flea Beetle in the garden, I'm pretty sure the Soldier Beetles finished them off, their population exploded around the time the Flea Beetles' declined. The cutworms were beginning damage some of the brassicas, so we stuck small nails along side the stems to prevent them cutting the entire stem off, they still climb up and take a leaf here and there, but we scout these areas too, and dig them up.

My first promising tomato on an early ripening Latah variety. These are bare, spindly plants, but they produce plenty of fruit, and always ripen earliest. The bushier Cherry Fox and Roma tomatoes are twice the size, but just starting to produce green fruits.

Hungarian Hot Wax and Carmen Peppers just starting to flower. We spike them with nails as well, to prevent any cutworm damage. We've been babying these peppers along for nearly 4 months now, I don't think I could stand to see one of them toppled.

And our first crop of snow peas in the market garden is about a week away, they started to flower a few days ago. The succession of peas and beans stretches out to the millet and wheat crop. We spaced our successional plantings by 10 days, and in the early spring, those 10 days make a big difference, but our last two plantings are nearly identical in size. It's amazing what a little heat and rain will do!

Makin' hay while the sun shines

That's the trick around here, in a humid climate there are short weather windows. The best quality hay, and the highest protein hay, is made from pastures in the pre-bloom and early heading stages. For us that means that we can make the best hay from mid to late June. But typically, the weather is difficult to predict, with thunder showers blowing through that may, or may not, go around us. So we have developed a strategy for making good hay in a short weather window, a strategy that also helps us to improve our tired pastures.

The north hay field, which is not grazed, is primarily Timothy grass. The Clovers don't compete well in this field because it is low-lying and floods in the spring melt. Goldenrod is invading, and slowly out-competing the Timothy, and this field will need to be turned and re-sown to completely revitalize it. When our weather window broke this year, the Timothy was in the early heading stages. Actually the animals pick the Timothy heads out of the hay, the seeds would be high in protein. But there is still a high percentage of leaf compared to stalk in this early heading stage. About 20% of this field is scattered with clover, dandelion and vetch, making it a decent hay, but not high enough in protein to carry a lactating animal or weanlings.

We have two acres in this north field that were planted to grain last year. The grain came up with a self-sown understory of clover. After harvesting the grain, we left the clover to establish itself, and these two acres will provide us with the kind of high-protein hay we need for our lactating does. Again, the clover is at it's highest quality in the pre-bloom stage (meaning that the flower buds are just beginning to form), and fortunately, that is exactly when we were able to cut it.

Our strategy for making hay in short weather windows is to cut it early, while the crop is still light, but high quality, and to cut it high. We cut 6 to 8 inches above the ground, instead of the traditional 1 or 2 inches. What's left in the field is mostly stalk, the least palatable or nutritious portion of the plant, and the young growth. The stubble holds the cut hay above the ground, away from moisture, and allowing air flow underneath the windrow. The combination of a light crop and the added air-flow can cut a day or even two off of the drying period.

The benefit of leaving the stalk and young growth is earlier recovery of the fields. Since practicing this method we have noticed our pastures recover earlier and faster in the spring. The also recover quickly after haying, allowing the possibility of a light grazing, or even a second cut of hay in late July.

Actually the practice of cutting and drying herbs has taught me a lot about making good hay. When harvesting a herb, generally the practice is to cut no more than two-thirds of the plant. Similarly, herbs are harvested before flowering. And the highest quality dried herbs are dried quickly and exposed to as little moisture as possible.

We cut on Wednesday afternoon, there were warnings of thunder showers on Wednesday, but the sky cleared and the forecast was for a hot, windy day Thursday, Friday and Saturday were a bit cooler with part cloud, and Sunday called for a chance of showers with rain on Monday. If we got two good drying days in a row, we could comfortably bale Friday afternoon, but if the humidity rose, or with heavy dews, we would bale Saturday. The forecast looked promising, but when is the forecast ever right?

Well, we lucked out with no dew Wednesday night, and Thursday was a perfect drying day, 28C/82F, sunny and breezy. We let the top dry out Thursday, and again no dew Thursdays night. Although Friday morning dawned with a heavy cloud cover and forecast for showers Friday night, rain on Saturday. Oh the fickle spring weather! We raked the hay Friday morning, flipping the windrows to expose damp underside to the drying breezes, and hoped for a break in the clouds. It did break long enough to dry out the hay, but JUST dry enough to save. After a few hours of sun, the clouds once again advanced and we paced the field, testing the hay here and there, finding a few damp clumps, but overall, it was ready.

Hay that is ready to bale should be dry enough to hear it crinkle when you twist it. But it need not be so dry that the leaf crumbles at the touch, not oven dry. If it is too dry, the nutritious leaf will shatter in the baler and you will be left with stalk.

Another way to test the hay is to scrape the stalk. The field pictures didn't come out, so I took this one of some Alfalfa I'm drying for the tea cabinet. If the skin of the stalk peels back, it is dry enough to bale.

We baled Friday afternoon, only 48 hours after cutting, when the typical drying period for a heavy cut of hay is 3 to 4 or more days, a weather window impossible to find in our early summer. And as you can see, as we finished up, the clouds were thick, and it began to spit on us as we unloaded the wagon. Just in time. But it is some of the best hay we have ever made, and worlds apart from any hay we have been able to buy. We harvested 130 (40lb) bales from 4 acres, which is a pretty poor crop when compared to improved pastures. But each one of our bales compares in nutrition to two or three bales of the kind of hay we can buy locally, which are cut in late July and consist primarily of stalk, and only weigh about 25lbs.

We are certainly the talk of the town in the farming circle, they think we are crazy cutting so early and leaving so much stalk in the field! But we would also need twice the barn to store all that poor-quality hay. Most of the local square bales are cut for sale, not for use, and the primary reason for baling in late July or early August is to get as many bales off the field, therefore as much money off the field, as possible. Our hay is cut with a different motivation, and therefore uses different techniques. It would be nice if there were more out-of-the-box thinkers in rural areas to reintroduce fresh ideas and approaches to agrarian life.