Organic Gardening Info from Peaceful Valley

It’s feeling a bit like Fall here in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Time to start thinking about Fall and Winter proofing your gardens, cleaning and putting up your tools and harvesting those last but not least vine ripe tomatoes. It’s also a great time to get those cover crops and wildflower seeds in the ground while the soil is still warm enough to get the seeds to germinate and put some roots down to hold them in place for the winter. Then they are ready to “take off” when the warmth of Spring wakes them up again. Then you’ve got a great start on your garden soil building, and wildflowers will be mature enough to put on some flowers for beautiful spring and summer color! Don’t forget to plant your greens, brassicas, garlic, onions and potatoes too!

Trombocino

If you are already placing seed orders for next summer’s garden, try these. In my opinion, the best summer squash in the whole world is Trombocino. It’s tender, firm & nutty and quite novel too. My favorite pole bean is Spanish Musica with outstanding flavor and quite tender even when large.

It’s difficult to remember what all those terms mean! Renee’s Garden is one of the companies Peaceful Valley has chosen to use as a source of quality seeds. Here is a great explanation of the terms “Hybrid”, “Open Pollinated”, and “Heirloom” from their website:
http://www.reneesgarden.com/articles/heirlooms.html

Hello All,

I am seeking Gigante Greek Bean Seeds for growing and am not having very good luck.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

There it is.  The first tilled row of the GGP.  At the crack of 8 am (huck it up, farmers…that’s early for us city-folk!) I was out there, tilling up my back yard.  The actual tilling itself took about 3 hours.  We had to go over each row multiple times, stopping to dig up rocks and sundry other oddities.  Among the strange things found that had to be removed: 3 cigarette lighters, a 2′ x 4′, a Happy Meal toy, broken glass, an old irrigation pipe that went nowhere, and concrete support posts for what apparently used to be a deck.  The final stage was going over everything one final time, my son in my lap (he LOVES tractors!) to make sure the yard was as level as possible. (more…)

I had a customer ask me the other day in the store how one clove of garlic makes a whole bulb and all I could think to answer at the moment was “Why that’s the miracle of life!”

I think he wanted a little more scientific explanation at first but seemed highly satisfied with my answer.

I have never planted a Hubbard squash in my garden but every year for the past 3 years I have had these magnificent squash miraculously appear in my garden.  I harvested around 10 of these giant, blue beauties each weighing around 20 pounds each. The flavor is unmatched in the squash world.  The seeds must have originally gotten into my compost.

I don’t really care how they got there all I know is  that this garden is a miracle and I am grateful for its tasty abundance.

(Image borrowed from flickr, creative commons license allows public use)

Fall is my favorite time of the year except for one thing. When do I pull up my still-producing garden to put in the winter cover crop? I have purchased it already, so it will happen. I’m just not sure when.

The light is so beautiful now, the days are definitely shorter, but the bees are still stimulating the green beans to produce and the tomatoes are still ripening. I know soon I will have to step in, but when? I started the garden from seeds, many that were saved from the year before.

It was fun to try to trick the cold weather into leaving the seedlings alone enough to germinate and grow. They have produced an abundance of produce that has allowed me to freeze and dry enough for the next year as well as share with my neighbors and co-workers. It’s a good feeling to be able to do that, but I still have to decide.

When? Logically, it should be before the rains start, which is pretty soon, but I guess I don’t yet want to give up the fun and work and good flavor of picking dinner every night. I really like visiting the garden two to three times a day. We share a lot of memories.

Maybe this will be the year that winter starts late, or maybe I’m fooling myself because I’m not ready. I’m just going to enjoy it all right now and when it’s time, I hope I’ll know.

Time and Place: Mid-September/ PVFS retail store

A mother-daughter team present me with a hand basket half full of seed packets. (Even if you want to see it as half empty, that is one heck of a lot of seeds!) The mom explains that she allowed her daughter (5 years old, I’d guess) to pick and chose freely. “She likes to see things sprout”, she explains.

I find myself envious of this child. My inner child finds these little packets enticing every time I restock the shelves or locate something specific for a customer. Renee’s Gardens, Horizon Herbs, Turtle Tree, and of course, Peaceful Valley’s own…the graphic promises, the creatively chosen names, the crop I would love to grow but know I’d be the only one to consume in my picky family.

Dang! What a fortunate child! I hope someday she thanks her mother for her indulgence. Maybe when she is a mother herself, she will realize how abundantly “over the top” her youthful garden was.

Before my father passed over ten years ago, I made him cry by just such a personal realization and a Father’s Day card. My seeds came in little baby food jars and were the generic farmer’s fair – simple seeds that sprout without much care or fanfare. But I wrote a card to tell him that “gift” had outlived any bicycle, stereo, college tuition or dress he had every bought me. I’m glad I realized early enough that I too was a fortunate child.

The mornings have been cool, and I’m finally sleeping through the night without waking up in a torpor from heat induced dreams.

Thus I know that fall is here, and I can plant cover crop in my newly double-dug beds.  It’s been quite a process this summer of preparing rocky clay ground for growing, and I was anxious to finish in time to plant our soil builder mix, and get a good start on my garden next year.

With grandiose thoughts in my head of 6 foot tall legumes fixing pounds of nitrogen by December I scattered the seed and gave it a thorough watering.  I chanted Wendell Barry’s poem “Enriching the Earth” over the seeds for good measure.  The next morning….. who should arrive but thousands of ravenous birds, eating the delicious oat, pea , bean, and vetch seeds laid out so nicely for them.  A perfect fall breakfast!

Determined to fight back, I’m putting up some bird scare tape.  The red and silver kind that they think is fire.  It is still fire season here after all. Hopefully they’ll retreat into the hills.

Cover cropping is a hot topic at Peaceful Valley right now! Wise farmers and gardeners are planting cool season annual legumes and grasses now in order to till in in the spring. It’s a cheap and practical way to add good nutrition and organic matter to the soil.

For the more poetically inspired, I came across a beautiful poem by Wendell Berry, an eloquent writer and careful farmer:

“Enriching the Earth”
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.
~~~~~~~~~~

If you liked that, you’ll LOVE “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”
Here’s a snippet, “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.”