June is berry month, and July, and August, and September

 A handful of strawberries a day is a pretty good deal in my book.  You can see that they are not huge, more the size of marbles.  Alpine strawberries are an ever-bearing strawberry.  They flower early and start producing the first berries about the end of May in our area.  They keep on producing until frost.  They love a top dress of compost every year, and occasionally need to be repotted.  I have successfully started more plants by letting them get over ripened.  I save those berries in a bag in the freezer and their little seeds fall right out of the fruit.  I put them on some growing media like seed starting mix, lightly covered, and keep them moist.  Bottom heat is not necessary, but light is.  They are tiny seedlings that can be transplanted a couple months after they emerge.  They do not run, so you can not propagate with that method of rooting the runners.  Keep the plants moist, but not wet.  I grow mine in window boxes in a stacked style planter.  A tiered planter might be more ideal.  Put the boxes in the ground over winter and pull them out again in spring to their summer home.  Berries must be fully ripe, no white on them, for the best flavor.  You will not be disappointed to have these lovely babies as part of your annual gardening traditions.

  

Rain and the garden wait for no man

I took a walk in the garden before work this morning in between rain storms.  We have been hit pretty hard with wind and rain.  There has been plenty of storm damage keeping my co-workers in the district offices busy in to the wee hours of the morning.  The rain has kept us out of the fields.  We are so close to finishing the tree planting that this is an unwelcome roadblock to that completion.  The walk this morning was a welcome diversion.  I found my garlic forming scapes (seed heads) which were ripe for the picking.  These saute up well in dishes and are best picked early to continue good garlic bulb formation.  Seed formation tends to diminish the rest of your plants in general.
I took another gander around the yard on my return from work and found a bountiful crop of those beautiful Alpine strawberries.  So packed with flavor in their marble size miniature form.

They will be a tasty addition to a spinach salad for supper.  I made up some bacon to make it an official spinach salad.  The cool weather has produced the best crop of spinach I have had in my garden in years.  I have taken note that planting on the north side of my raised beds helps to keep it from bolting early.  This will be the first spring I have had success with this crop.  I planted in square foot fashion and popped about 3 seeds per dibble hole to ensure success.  The first round was thinning out the extras and now I take out the largest of the plants.  Lettuce has also been a terrific crop this year.
If you are experiencing rain, take the time to see how truly beautiful the garden is with the moisture brightening all the colors.  It's worth the damp feet.

A very wet weekend, cold is back for now

After a week of such fine weather, we were hit with precipitation most of the weekend.  Lots of precipitation in the form of rain.  The temperatures stayed mild which made being in the yard a pleasure when it was dry.
I have a few wooden garden items needing staining, so those I pulled into the garage to keep them dry.  If I can't work in the yard on my vacation, I will get something done.  The pots and flats that were stacked on my mobile plant rack had to find a place on the garage shelves instead.  Spring will come, and I am going to be ready for it!
I wandered down into the vegetable garden and decided to pull out the strawberry boxes and pots of perennial daisies that were heeled in.  I let them sit out and collect rain for the weekend.  The strawberries needed some cleaning out of dead foliage also.  The forecast for the week is cold, sometimes below freezing, so I provided some cover between the raised beds to hold them for a little while longer.  The planter box that I keep them in is one of my staining projects, so a home in the vegetable garden is suitable for now.  Taking the boxes out of their winter bed allowed me to prep one raised bed for spring planting.  I had just put down and secured the edges of the plastic cover when the first rain drops started falling.  There is one 4 x 8 foot spot in my yard that didn't get a total wash out this weekend.
I located my parsnips that I overwintered in the ground by the tiny green shoots poking up through the dirt.  I dug those out and cleaned them up, so this would make them (technically) my first harvest of 2014!  I also put some frost cover over the few plants that made it through the winter.  I was very disappointed to find that the two baby cabbage that made it through the winter were dug out by squirrels rooting around for hidden nuts.  My yard has divots in every garden bed from their spring time digging.  I have new seedlings in the basement for red cabbage and baby pak choi.  The Brisk Green pak choi and spring seeded baby cabbage is well on its way to being ready for spring planting along with my Alisa Craig onions as soon as the weather allows.  I seeded all my peppers on Sunday and the tomatillos as well.  I am going to give them a little more time than the tomatoes this year, hopefully give them just a little more growth before June planting.

Alisa Craig onions, Baby cabbage, Brisk Green pak choi

The weather men have cold and snow in the forecast for today.  They have promised that it will not stick.  Several of the local rivers, including parts of the Milwaukee River, are at flood stage.  I consider myself lucky to still have hope for getting in the garden soon.

Planting Garlic

Some people have never planted garlic before.  Six years ago, I was one of them.  It is such and easy crop and uses garden space during the slower parts of the growing season when you have the space.
The first step is to buy good bulbs of garlic from the farmer's market.  Make sure they are not damaged and are nice and firm.  Size will depend on the type you are planting, but the bigger the better.  If your goal is to braid garlic, then you will need a soft neck variety (ask your farmer, he will know).  If you like a bigger bulb, then the hard neck varieties are probably more your speed.  I have hard neck garlic in the photo above.  You will never braid those stiff stems.  I have one bulb broken into the six individual cloves.  The cloves are what you plant.  So, in this case, one bulb should yield six more bulbs if all goes well.

A general rule of thumb for planting bulbs is to plant three times the depth of the bulb.  A one inch high bulb would be planted three inches deep.  My garlic will go in about 4" deep.  I dig a trench, add some compost, put in the clove of garlic (pointy end up), and cover with more compost.  Done!

I mark the ends of my garlic row so I don't start another early season crop there next spring.  I also put down some of my expanded metal squirrel-be-gone deterrents.  If you have ever planted fall bulbs just to have them come and dig them up, this is an effective barrier to keep them out.  I have had mystery bulbs come up in my yard from squirrels re-burying bulbs from the neighbor's yards.  This year I had a bonus canna.  Other years I have had tulips, hyacinths, and one other spring bulb that has multiplied and I still don't know the name of it.

As long as I had the shovel out, I dug a trench on the north side of one of my raised beds and tucked the Alpine strawberries in for winter.  Unless we get a warm stretch, my berry days are done.  I have not covered them in past years and they seem to overwinter just fine.  I choose the north side to reduce the freeze-thaw cycle that the south side of the beds tend to have.  I also chose to not put my garlic in the raised beds this year as last year's mild winter was confusing the garlic into growing so early.  It didn't matter what side it was on as the soil barely froze last winter.
Tomorrow I will get out to clean out the beds and get my snow drops and daffodils in for next spring's bloom.

My Cold Weather Crops

 All the tomatoes have ripened and are not going to wait for us to eat them all fresh.  Tonight, they became spaghetti sauce with one lone tomato on the window sill as a tribute to all the tomatoes that have gone before.

I am still holding on to my lettuce and cilantro.  The late crop of radishes that I put in have a couple sets of leaves, but I doubt that the gamble I took will pay off in late radishes.  I have a double cover on the bed of row and frost cover.  The rain has been getting through, the sunlight is too low to really push any growth at this time of year.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The two varieties of kale that I grew for eating are powering through this time of year.  Kale thrives in the cold weather and the flavor improves.  I have to get out and get some of this on our plates soon.

There is still some Swiss chard and radicchio hanging in there.  I haven't prepared as much of the chard as I have in years past (not one of John's favorites).  The radicchio is a new plant for me.  My coworkers enjoyed the first crop preparing it in different ways.  They shared how well it worked in their cooking.  I think this will be on our plates soon.

 Parsnips are just starting the process which makes them best in cold weather.  The starches start to turn to sugars making the plant fused with anti-freeze qualities.  It also makes them very tasty.  I used a couple in some beef pasties a few weeks ago.  They are only getting sweeter as they get colder.

The Alpine strawberries are still trying to put on some fruit.  It is taking so long for them to turn red.  Sunlight is waning and so it the ripening power.  They are still a delight whenever I find one on the plants.  I think the squirrels have been beating me to the picking, though.

 On the other side of cold weather plants are the ornamentals.  The sedum in the background is a lovely back-drop to the Sunrise flowering kale.  The sweet alysum fills in with a bed of snowy white flowers.  Right behind this bed are the stars of the garden right now.

As everything else has died back, the 4-pack of flowering kale I purchase this spring is just glowing!  While walking back from voting on Tuesday, I was astounded at how vibrant these are even from the distance.  It is no wonder I have had so many people stop and ask what they are.  They are like the neon signs of my fall garden.  I apologize to those wondering what variety it is since I did not have a tag with them.  Next year...more flowering kale.  They really do look best when in full sun.

My pot of Sunset flowering kale is also looking pretty good.  The plants brightened up after moving them into brighter light.  I will tuck a few evergreen boughs into the soil to fill it out and take it into the Christmas season like I did last year.  Maybe some lights as well.