Archive for the 'Vegetables' Category
Last spring, I planted rainbow carrot seeds in our vegetable garden. I planted a second crop of rainbow carrot seeds in our garden last September. This week, I harvested the remaining carrots from the spring crop. The first picture above shows some of the red, purple, white, and yellow carrots I harvested. The only color of carrots I didn’t harvest was orange!
These carrots had been in the ground a long time (nearly 10 months). Many of them had grown to be very large. And I don’t remember ever fertilizing them. They don’t seem to need it. Carrots are one of the lowest maintenance vegetables that I have grown. The carrot in the bottom picture has a green top, because that part of the carrot was protruding above the ground.
I have heard that carrots can be left in the ground over the winter, and that the cold winter weather stimulates them to get sweeter. This week we received nearly 6 inches of rain. So I decided to harvest the rest of the spring carrots, because I was concerned that they might start rotting in the ground. In fact, some of them already had a few brown spots.
Some of our carrots were forked. Carrots tend to get forked when their roots run into rocks or hard dirt clods. Also, some of our carrots had split open, possibly because of too much watering during the growing season. But one of the nice things about vegetables is that even the less than perfect looking ones are still edible. Once they are sliced and cooked, who can tell the difference anyway?
January 24 2010 | Carrots | 1 Comment »
It may not be possible to produce 100% of one’s fruit and vegetable needs in a suburban backyard garden. But after my second season of growing a vegetable garden, I have been thinking about exactly how much our vegetable garden has reduced our food bill.
Below I have listed the approximate amount of produce we have grown this year in our vegetable garden and the cost to buy the equivalent amount of produce in a local grocery store. The prices that grocery stores charge for produce vary greatly from store to store, from region to region, and at different times of the year. The prices per pound of the various items of produce I have described below are approximate average prices that grocery stores in my area have charged this year.
This year, for example, our strawberries produced about a 1 pound of berries per week from mid-May through mid-August and about 0.25 pounds per week after that through the present. Strawberries typically cost at least $3 per pound in our area in the spring, summer, and fall. That’s at least $50 worth of strawberries.
We harvested at least 35 pounds of tomatoes this season. At a price of $2 per pound, that’s about $70 worth of tomatoes. We turned most of those tomatoes into a pizza sauce that we use on homemade pizza as well as in pasta dishes.
We have harvested and eaten about 14 pounds of green beans from late June until now. That doesn’t include the dried beans I harvested last week. At a price of $2.50 per pound, our plants have produced about $35 worth of fresh green beans.
We have grown about 30 carrots that weighed about 15 pounds. At $1.20 per pound, that’s about $18 worth of carrots. We harvested at least 20 zucchinis. At $2 per pound, that’s about $40 worth of zucchinis from our garden. We picked about 8 pounds of eggplants. At $3 per pound, that equals about $24 dollars worth of eggplants. We harvested about 10 pounds of onions that would have cost about $13 to purchase. We also harvested about $10 worth of bell and jalapeno peppers, about $10 worth of basil, about $10 worth of corn, about $5 worth of broccoli, and about $5 worth of spinach.
That equals a total of about $290 worth of produce from the vegetable garden we planted in our yard to replace a 10′ x 20′ lawn. I estimate that I spent about $120 to buy fertilizer, seeds, transplants, and other supplies to start and maintain our vegetable garden this year. It’s hard to estimate how much of our water bill comes from watering the vegetable garden, but a really rough estimate is about $25 from April through October.
Subtracting out the costs, our vegetable garden netted us about $145 dollars this year. That does not amount to a tremendous savings on our food bill. However, gardening is perhaps one of the few hobbies that saves a hobbyist money rather than costing the hobbyist money. Also, I figure that I can increase our yields next year by cutting out some of the plants that did not produce quality produce, like honeydew melons, and planting more of the plants that were easy to grow and inexpensive to plant by seed or transplant, like carrots and onions.
The yield from our pepper plants this year was disappointing compared to last year and prior years when we grew them in pots. This year, our peppers got crowded by the nearby tomatoes and beans. I think I can get them to produce more next year by giving them more room to grow and by fertilizing them more. Optimistically, I think that our vegetable garden, which consists of a 6′ x 7′ raised bed, a 6′ x 8′ raised bed, and a bunch of pots, has the potential to produce $400-$500 dollars worth of produce in a good year at today’s prices.
October 11 2009 | Vegetables | 1 Comment »
I came across this interesting article in a local publication recently. It discusses the use of wood treated with chromated copper arsenate (CCA) in garden beds. Wood is treated with chemicals such as CCA to kill microorganisms and insects that can cause the wood to decay. The article discussed the possibility that people who build their vegetable gardens using wood treated with CCA might end up consuming arsenic that leached into the soil from the wood.
In 2004, the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate at the University of Minnesota published a study of vegetables grown near wood that has been treated with CCA. In the study, the researchers discovered that plants grown within a few centimeters of CCA treated wood absorbed significantly greater concentrations of arsenic than plants grown several feet away from the wood. Although they concluded that based on U.S. Public Health Service standards these vegetables would be safe for human consumption, they also stated that some of the vegetable crops may not be safe for sustained consumption based on the US EPA’s standard.
In 2004, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a voluntary agreement with industry began restricting the use of CCA in treated timber in residential and commercial construction, with some exceptions.
However, just a few weeks ago, I discovered a piece of lumber in my yard (see above picture) that had a yellow tag stapled onto it. The lumber was placed around a raised bed near our fence by the previous owners of our house. The yellow tag indicated that the wood had been treated with CCA. I had a rosemary bush growing next to that piece of lumber for years. I also have two orange bushes growing about 6 feet away from it. Based on the results of the University of Minnesota study, I think that our oranges are far enough away from the treated lumber to have avoided absorbing much arsenic from it. But I have pulled up the rosemary bush, and I plan on removing the treated piece of lumber soon.
September 19 2009 | Vegetables | No Comments »
As shown in this picture, we harvested yellow and white carrots, walla walla onions, a bunch of big beef and early girl tomatoes from our vegetable garden today. We are making homemade pizza sauce, minestrone soup, and vegetable lasagna with our harvest. We saved money by growing many of the ingredients for these recipes ourselves, and all of these vegetables were easy to grow. Beyond planting in the spring and then harvesting months later, maintaining our vegetable garden did not require a lot of effort.
The automatic watering system in our vegetable garden saves us the trouble of having to water regularly. I fertilized multiple times after planting. But once the plants started growing rapidly, I figured there wasn’t a need for much additional fertilizer. And I only needed to do a little bit of weeding. I think that the weeds just didn’t get a chance to grow, because I planted the vegetables relatively close together. Once the vegetable plants started to grow together, there wasn’t much sunlight to stimulate weed growth in between them.
I just planted another set of carrot seeds. July and August is the time to plant carrot seeds for an autumn and winter harvest. One nice thing about carrots is that they hold well in the ground after they reach maturity without rotting or losing quality. That means you can leave them in the ground for months until you are ready to harvest them.
July 26 2009 | Carrots and Onions and Tomatoes | No Comments »
Carrots have been one of the most enjoyable vegetables to grow in our garden. Back in early April, I planted seeds for red, yellow, white, and purple carrots. Most of the seeds sprouted as extremely tiny seedlings, but they grew very fast. After 3 months, they have grown so large that they are crowding each other (see top picture).
Some of our carrots went to seed before they developed more than a tiny little carrot. But most of them have not seeded yet. Carrots are supposed to be a spring or fall crop, because they tend to go to seed too soon in hot summer weather. Perhaps our relatively mild summers (highs averaging around 80 F) have kept most of them from seeding prematurely.
Many of our carrots are ready to harvest. On the seed package, it says 65-75 days to maturity, but our carrots seem to be taking longer than that. Also, carrots appear to last in the ground for a long time without going bad or losing flavor.
I determine when carrots are ready to harvest by digging around the top of the root to see when the carrot appears to have grown to a full size. (see bottom picture) Harvesting carrots is very fun, because it’s always a surprise when you pull them up and find out how big they are.
July 18 2009 | Carrots | No Comments »
We have been growing vegetables in two 6′ x 7′ raised beds since last summer. In these two small beds, we are growing several different types of fruits and vegetables including peppers, eggplant, zucchini, green beans, tomatoes, corn, carrots, onions, cantaloupe, and honey dew.
Our most successful plants so far are the green beans and zucchinis. They are producing more green beans and zucchinis than we can eat. Only a few of the tomatoes on our two tomato plants are have ripened so far (see second picture), but there are dozens of green tomatoes hanging on the vines.
Several of our carrots and onions are just about ready to harvest. The third picture shows some of the walla walla onions we are growing this season. Our corn stalks have reached their maximum height and are now starting to grow small corn ears.
Our eggplants and peppers are growing several small fruits. Although the peppers have not grown very much since I planted them in April. They seem to be getting crowded by the beans, carrots, and tomatoes growing next to them. One of the problems with growing so many different types of plants in a small area is that the slow growing plants like peppers and eggplant tends to get crowded by the faster growing plants. Next year, I may try to plant the slower growing plants together in one bed and the faster growing plants in the other bed.
I haven’t fertilized most of the plants in our vegetable garden since mid-May. I was fertilizing them with water soluble fertilizer for about the first 6 six weeks after planting. After that, most of the vegetables started growing so fast that I decided to stop the fertilizing. I have only been continuing to fertilize the eggplants and peppers in an attempt to get them to grow more.
I have also been fertilizing our strawberries about once a week. I know that sounds like a lot of fertilizer, but they have been producing strawberries continuously since early May. They show no signs of slowing down their fruit production yet. I have been harvesting a small bowl full of berries every few days for over two months. I attribute the huge production of berries to all the fertilizer. Last year, they stopped producing berries in early June. But as soon as I started fertilizing them, they begin to produce berries again.
Our strawberries are growing in pots around the raised beds, which makes it easy to pick them. Strawberries tend to rot quickly when the fruits are lying directly on damp soil. The berries mostly hang over the edges of the pots, so the berries stay dry.
July 12 2009 | Onions and Strawberries and Tomatoes and Vegetables | No Comments »
For a long time, I have wanted to grow a vegetable garden like the one my family had when I was growing up. For six years after I moved into my current house, I assumed that I did not have enough time to plant and tend to a vegetable garden. Last year, I realized that I may not have any more free time to tend to a vegetable garden until I retire. I didn’t want to wait that long (at least 25 years away), so I decided to try and make the time.
I wanted raised beds instead of a ground level garden to make it easier to amend the soil and keep the snails away. Rather than spend the time building it myself, I decided to pay the money to have a gardener dig up our side yard lawn, build two raised beds, and put in an automatic watering system.
Once those tasks were completed, it turns out that the vegetable garden did not require a substantial amount of my time. It takes a few hours to visit a nursery, buy the seeds and the transplants, and then plant them. After that, the automatic watering system takes care of the watering. I just need to fertilize and do a bit of weeding once every few weeks. Fertilizing and weeding doesn’t take me much time, because our raised beds are small, one is 6′ x 7′ and the other is 6′ x 8′. Harvesting the produce is the only additional task that needs to be done, and harvesting produce from my yard takes much less time than a trip to the grocery store.
I was telling all of this to one of my neighbors just yesterday. I think I may have convinced her to put in a vegetable garden in her yard.
Over the past several weeks, I have been planting this year’s vegetable garden in our two raised beds. I started this year’s plantings with broccoli in late February. In March, I planted pole bean seeds, cantaloupe and honey dew seeds, carrot seeds, tomato transplants, a zucchini transplant, a basil transplant, onion transplants, and cilantro transplants. So far in April, I have added bell peppers, an eggplant, summer squash transplants, and day neutral strawberry transplants. I also planted violas and hollyhocks to add a bit more visual appeal to the garden. In addition, I planted spinach seeds and garlic transplants last fall that are still growing.
I collected the pole bean seeds from dried up bean pods on last year’s bean plants. All of these bean seeds sprouted quickly, and they are already several inches high, as can be seen in the back of the first picture. I built a simple support for them that is made of two thin wooden posts, and a sturdy metal wire frame that is hanging on hooks I screwed into the wooden posts.
Most of the cantaloupe and honey dew seeds sprouted, but birds ate most of them soon after. Even though I covered them in netting, the birds picked at them through the netting. I know it was birds, because I found feathers near the picked-at seedlings. Frustrated with that experience, I replaced them with cantaloupe transplants I bought from a local nursery. The birds have not touched these yet, probably because they are already large enough to be unappealing.
I planted two sets of the carrot seeds, once in early March and a second one in early April. Many of the carrot seeds I planted in early March didn’t spout. The carrot seeds I planted a few weeks ago are just starting to emerge. This year, I planted white and purple carrots in addition to the yellow and red carrots I planted last year. The yellow carrots did especially well last year. It’s so fun to see such tiny seeds turn into large colorful carrots in just a few months!
April 18 2009 | Vegetables | 1 Comment »
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