Category: From Farm to Table Page 1 of 5

On the lunar calendar, April 20 marks the start of “谷雨”, which means “seeding in rain”. This is a period associated with significant more precipitation and considered the best time for sowing seeds.

So here it begins, my 2023 vegetable garden! I have sown several trays of seeds at the beginning of April already.

Above is the chicken scratch I created to record what seeds I have sown. I do not use plant tags most of them break down top quicky. With this sowing map, I only need to label the trays which is easier to keep track. Speaking of trays, I use these aluminium food trays used in catering events at my work. Usually after catering events, they are rinsed off and sent to recycle bin. So all I need to do is to bring some home. They are perfect for holding 28 of the 1-inch nursery pots and for me to bottom water the seedlings. After all the seedlings are planted, I can simply recycle them just like they would have been a couple months before.

Tray 2: Eggplants (Chinese strings, Ping Tung), China Jade cucumber, onions, and some tomato seeds I got from my sister.

Besides a few vegetable garden staples, I also sowed some flowers for the first time. I want to interplant my vegetable garden this year with ornamental flowers, so I can make more bouquet for the house. I figured that it should not be too hard to raise flowers from seeds just like vegetables. For my first try, there are calendale (pacific beauty mix), zinnia (polar bear), gaura (sparkle white), cosmos (peppermint), marigold (white swan), and borage. I sowed mostly white flowers – I think they will look really good with abundance of green leaves in a vegetable garden.

Tray 1: Flowers!

I raise most of my seedlings using old nursery pots. We purchased a few seedling kits when landscaping our front yard, the sunny herb garden, and most recently, the side yard. I saved the nursery pots from these plant kits, and have been using them for seed starting. For small seeds like tomatoes, I also use seedling pods. To pot them up, all I needed to do is to bury the seedling pods in potting soil without disturbing the root at all.

Tray 3: Cucumbers, ornamental gourds, and herbs.

The tray above contains cucumbers (Suyo long cucumber, Armenian pale green), Luffa, and birdhouse gourd. These plants have sensitive root system and I found the best way of avoiding transplanting shock is to sow their seeds in as big of nursery pots as possible. The small green container with seedling pods are planted with some herb seeds such as rosemary, basil, thyme, and stevia. I used regular potting soil for my seed starting, which contains fertilizer and can feed the seedlings until they are transplanted into the ground. Comparing to using seedling mix, planting seeds directly in the potting soil spared me from having to fertilize the seedlings at all.

Tray 4: Tomatoes and peppers.

The entire fourth tray are planted with tomatoes and peppers! I got different varieties of peppers, including some really hot ones. from Pepper Joe’s and the germination was good last year. I also sowed several heirloom tomatoes I have grown last year. We enjoyed cooking with different kind of tomatoes and the sauces made with different varieties taste very flavorful. We have been using the tomato sauces we cooked in homemade pizza, pasta, chilli, and tomato soup. Cannot wait to get more this year again!

The last a few things I sowed are beetroots, ginger, and bunny tail ornamental grasses. I have sown beetroots directly in the ground, which worked very well. But this year, I would like to get some early harvest hence sowing them early. These little beetroot seedlings did not disappoint – they all came up within the first week of sowing and their colors are so vibrant already.

I also directly planted ginger in the ground before, but did not get a good harvest. Our summer days are too short gingers. To get an early start this year, I planted organic ginger pieces in the soil in Mid march. I have not seen any sprout yet – not a good sign, but I am hopeful with the help of this video from a Youtube channel called “Soil and Margaritas“. Hopefully we can unlock the secret of growing ginger this year!

The 10-day update!

Shortly after sowing the seeds, we started to see some sprouts. Below are the pictures I took on 4/12, 10 days after I sowed the seeds::

Tomatoes:

Beetroots:

Cucumber:

Calendale, zinnia, and gaura.

We are still experiencing freezing nights and some cold days. A shelving unit in my home office is where all the seedlings are kept. My office is at the Northeast corner of the house and does not have sufficient lighting for seedlings to grow. But I have discovered a simple way of raising seedlings without the need of adding grow light – by simply putting the seedling trays outside during the day when the weather is warm enough. Although the seedlings are only outside for 9-10 hours, versus grow lights were usually kept on for 16 hours per day, but our intense Colorado sun keeps the seedlings happy and I have never experienced any problems with leggy seedings.

One additional advantage of raising the seedling under sunlight is that I do not need to harden them off before planting. The process of hardening off seedlings can be tedious and usually requires around-the-clock care during the first week. Accidentally leaving the seedlings in bad weather can destroy these tiny plants in just a couple hours. But the seedlings grow up with natural sunlight and breeze are already conditioned to the outdoor conditions and do not need any hardening off period.

I will be sowing more seeds mostly warm weather crops – pumpkins, cantaloupes, and  watermelons later this month. In a months we will be looking at a full rack of healthy seedlings for this season! I hope that you are having fun planning and planting your garden as well. Happy Spring!

The end of 2021 veggie garden

Right after my garden clean up last week, we had a week of hard frost. The veggie garden finally came to an end:

Tomatoes:

Luffa:

Peppers:

Aubergine:

Watermelons:

Honeydew melons:

Pole beans

Birdhouse gourds:

Our dill went to seeds in early Oct. You can see the new sprouts below already.

It is like we have a never-ending vegetable garden – some self-seed, some produce runners, and some are just perennials. In the vegetable patch, we have garden chive and asparagus. Chive is not only evergreen in our zone, but also ever-growing even under snow. All the chives we have are from one small started plant we got in 2018. It grew into a monster bush by the end of 2019 season, then I divided it and planted the subdivisions along the first vegetable bed as a hedge. During summer months, we shear this hedge once a month, and use the clippings to make delicious pork chive dumplings.

When weather gets cold, the growth of the hedge does slow down, but still produces enough for us to crop for seasoning.

The asparagus patch occupies one of our five veggie beds. Although only in its second year, we have enjoyed lots of asparagus this Spring. When summer hit I let it grow freely into a patch of fern, which puts on a colorful show in the Fall:

It is time to clean up the veggie patch

I spent a Saturday pulling dead plants out, gathering the remaining harvest, and weeding. It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed working in the vegetable garden. I like how neat it is with pea gravel on all the path, a much needed upgrade from the woodchip mulch we had before.

Below is the first veggie bed with the chive hedge. This bed was planted with garlic last Fall, and was home to peppers and watermelons later in the season.

On the other side of our asparagus patch, the 3rd bed was planted with cucumber and tomato this year. The vertical trellis we made with T-posts and a cattle panel worked well for growing cucumbers. So it stays.

We also built a bean tunnel this spring. They held up well with gourds and pole beans growing on them. Below the bean tunnel, I planted beetroots, aubergine, bush beans, lettuces and kale.

This was the veggie garden before my cleaning effort:

And after.

Tidying up the patio garden

Another area planted with vegetables was the small flower bed next to the shed. It is the farthest flower bed from the house and we do not see it from the backdoor, so I planted green zucchini and yellow squashes here.

which were certainly done after the frost:

Pulling these humongous green “snakes” out was surprisingly easy – they had very shallow roots, which made me wonder how on earth they produced so much! I also cut back the irises in this bed:

As I told you in my last week’s garden clean-up, I transplanted a subdivision of a red hot poker grass under the apple tree. The apple flowers white and the irises flower purple. I think this grass will fit in well.

Charlie followed me during the whole clean up effort. By the end of the day, we were both covered in dirt and leaf clippings. What a sweet pup!

Moving the trellises and applying compost

I absolutely love the bean trellises Slav built this spring. It is very sturdy but also pretty to look at. But there is a small modification I’d like to make:

As you can see, both ends of the tunnel sit on the edge of the two beds below, making it hard to reach for plants near the bottom of the trellis. And honestly, it did not look pretty. I wish to shift the whole structure just a feet or two to the left, so the tunnel could sit in the middle of the beds below.

Although the panels were heavy, Slav still moved them for me. What a trouper! Be careful saying “I do”, guys, There will be a lot to do…

But honestly, doesn’t it look much better now spanning over the middle of the planting beds? Now I can easily reach to the bottom of the trellises from the paths on either side. We also adjusted the space between the panels. Each veggie bed is 16 feet long and each panel is about 4 feet wide. We left a few inches at the end and 1.5′ between panels. So the three panels can cover the entire length of veggie beds. I plan to grow different crops on each panel next year. But honestly, I think climbing gourds and melons will have no problem reaching neighboring panels.

As the T-posts were out and panels were down, Slav also flipped the soil in these two vegetable beds for me. It was actually quite labor-intensive. Our soil is hard clay with lots of rocks, and these two beds were never tilled before. We ended up with a bucket of rocks after tilling the soil!

While Slav was working on the beds, I turned our home-made compost. We have two big compost bins. We put all our kitchen scrapes, garden clippings, paper towels, and egg cartons in here. Due to our dry and cold weather, we never got much finished compost from them. The material just disappears…This time, I scraped some finished compost out, and remixed the remaining matter into one bin. It was quite steamy (the compost, not me) and messy, so I did not take any pictures of this process. But we now have a whole bin emptied out, providing plenty of space for the kitchen scrapes over winter months.

Planting next year’s garlic

After tilling the top soil and moving the trellises, we topped the two beds with compost:

We always apply a thick layer (4″-6″) compost to all of our vegetable beds in the Fall. The winter snow and spring rain wash the compost down into the soil. So when it is time to plant the veggie garden (usually on the Memorial Day weekend), the compost layer will be well-incorporated into the soil. The compost also functions as mulch for existing plants over winter months. This is particularly important for us because we always plant our garlic in the Fall.

I plant exclusively hard neck garlic for scapes. We usually plant in mid-Oct, as soon as the veggie beds are cleared out, which gives me something to immediately look forward to after the end of the last season. 🙂

After planting, I laid new drip tubing. We have been using 1/4″ black soaker hose in the veggie garden, which have disintegrated. They stopped providing adequate amount of water, so I had to hand-water this summer. These new drip tubing with built-in emitters should last a lot longer.

Zero waste gardening

After planting the garlic, we had a couple windy days. All the sudden, our crabapple tree dropped all of its leaves. We went from this:

to this, in just a week!

In the past, we have been raking up the leaves. But this year we are trying a new approach. Our neighbor kindly lent us a leave vacuum, which not only sucks up leaves, but also shred leaves into tiny pieces into the attached bag. It took quite some strength to operate – imaging waving a 30-lb big barrel while carrying a whole bag of leaves on one shoulder – but it created nice leave mulch, which we put over all the vegetable beds:

All the leaves from our yard are just the perfect amount to provide a 4″ layer of insulation. It is such a win-win for zero-waste gardening! Now, speaking for both the garlic cloves and us, we are ready for snow!