First garden a success!

Last week, full-time wife Pat and I revisited the first-time garden (and the gardeners who try to keep the weeds at bay!) in our neighborhood.  Reports and observation indicate that their garden was VERY productive, right up to the killer frost on the night of 07 September.  Brian, Carrie, and Donna canned twenty-five quarts of green beans, and have eighteen large tomatoe plants hanging around indoors, with hopes the large number of greenish fruit will continue to ripen. 

 Good production was harvested from the rows of intensively-planted carrots, broccoli, potatoes, cucumbers, and zucchini, with a bunch of large, ripe squash (those last two alleged "edible" veggies are, of course, poisonous to folks with functioning taste buds 😉) to boot.  Lessons learned for the 2021 garden include covering the plants with floating row cover (or light flannel sheets) when freezing temperatures threaten, increasing the amount of Spring-rototilled manure, better weed management, and planting fewer cucumber and zuchini starts.  I mentioned to the now-seasoned gardeners (as I have to all garden club members) that this year's garden seed and plant start shortages will be repeated next year, due to increasing seed crop failures in both commercial and backyard operations - if you have a favorite veggie or fruit, this is a great time to order or at least pre-order those precious seeds and starts.

Here at Rancho McGinty, the early "mini-frosts" of 01 and 02 September, and the killer frost of 07 September (seems we have now have to plan for more and earlier frosts!) wiped out the squash vines, the corn stalks, and tomatoe bushes - Pat and I thought they were wiped out, anyway, as the plants have since come back to life, and are now producing replacement green leaves!  I just left the "dead" plants in the ground, and I keep watering them in hopes of harvesting at least SOME ripe produce.  Sigh.

I guess that's why we call it "gardening", and not "harvesting"?

jim.

2020 Garlic Harvest is nearly ready

Dear Friends of Garlic:

Below is the 2020 garlic order form for Higher Ground Farm.

You should know up front that this has been a semi-crummy year for growing garlic – a number of farming factors are involved, but, suffice it to say, the garlic is not up to my personal standards. 

This year’s garlic is delicious, but is disappointing appearance-wise:  smaller bulbs and cloves, cracked skins, (which won’t affect your flavor enjoyment but isn’t as aesthetically pleasing) and a smaller harvest overall in comparison to previous years.  So, please order early as supplies are VERY limited.

Additionally, Pat and I are offering for sale some of our farm-fresh products to you, at local farmers’ markets and other gatherings as long as supplies last.   So far, the products include organically-raised veggies (currently: potatoes, onions, leeks, kale, turnips, cabbage, herbs, and more) at $1.50 per pound; my famous (well, “locally famous”) “Gardener’s Hand Soap”$3.00 a bar with several fragrances to choose from; natural first aid items - dandelion salve, pine sap in hemp oil or in a salve; (due to customer demand) Pat’s famous Goat Cheese varieties (plain, Ranch, or Garlic)$3.00 per four ounce container (required disclaimer “not for human comsumption”); and a small selection of vintage (cast iron!) manual food choppers/meat grinders, just in case you want to convert that small chunk of road-kill venison into delicious sausage.

Thanks for your understanding of the vagaries and challenges facing today’s small farmers (not diminutive farmers you understand, but farmers of small farms… well you get it).

Jim and Pat McGinty

12925 East Oregon Road

Elk, WA  99009

509-292-0326

j.p.mcgintyelk2@gmail.com

2020 Higher Ground Farm Garlic Pre-Order

Questions? – 509-292-0326 or j.p.mcgintyelk2@gmail.com

 

Name:________________________________________Phone__________________

 

Email:_________________________________________Date___________________

_

Garlic @ $7.50 per pound (purchase priority is based on the date we receive this order form):

_____ lb(s) Bogatyr – taste the heat when raw; mellows when cooked

_____ lb(s) Georgian Fire – extremely hot even when cooked

_____ lb(s) German Red – robust garlic flavor, excellent in pesto

_____ lb(s) Musik – sweet garlic flavor; medium heat, excellent baked or roasted

_____ lb(s) Polish Red – excellent garlic flavor; medium heat

_____ lb(s) Spanish Roja – classic garlic with some heat, great flavor

 

I am pre-ordering this Garlic with the understanding that weather and/or soil conditions can alter the harvest and, therefore, the availability of the garlic I order.  I will be called or emailed should substitutions be necessary.   

Weeding between the lines

By Jim McGinty

 

The heat of Summer is upon us, and our gardens (and the weeds!) are finally flourishing.  Here at Rancho McGinty, the Roy’s Calais dent corn (corn to be ground into cornmeal) stalks are seven feet tall, and I swear I can hear the corn leaves squealing as they grow.  The poisonous but impressive squash plants are monstrous, and constantly on the outlook for food:  I never pass the squash plants within their viney reach.

Once again, the panels of black weed block fabric with pre-cut planting holes were a production superpower: the onions, leeks, and cabbage were huge, and weed free!

In the berry garden, the Quinault strawberries are producing a quart of juicy goodness every other day (fresh strawberry milkshakes!), while the Doyle thornless blackberries are just coming on – seriously, they make the best blackberry jam I’ve ever tasted.  Did I mention that they are also thornless?

Our garlic crop this year was only so-so:  smaller bulbs, fewer skins (which means cracks between the cloves), and overall fewer bulbs.  A combination of possible causes:  heavy, continuous rain in late Spring and early Summer, hot and dry weather when the rain window closed, underground grass root competition, and other farmer factors.  The good news is that the garlic tastes delicious, and I will have enough cloves to replant in late September for the 2021 harvest.

In the fruit tree orchard, a late Spring frost destroyed most of the beautiful apple, pear, and cherry blossoms – happily the Italian plum trees are loaded with fruit (plums generally have a later blossom period), so our breakfast toast will still have spreadable jam!  Reminder:  remember to prune your plum trees right after harvest, for best production next Summer.

Our cool weather root crops (potatoes, turnips, beets, and carrots) produced bushel baskets of tastiness:  I had never eaten turnips, and so I was expecting maybe musty, dirt-flavored ickyness, but I shredded a couple of turnips (replacing shredded potatoes) into a frittata with scrambled eggs and cheddar cheese, and it was very good!  Easy to grow, and tasty to boot – good to know for early Spring planting calendars.

Finally, remember to harvest veggies as they mature, to encourage additional production:  tomatoes, peppers, squash, ornamental eggplant (I mean tubes of purple Styrofoam ®), cucumbers all need to be monitored daily for ripe perfection.

Now is the time to plan for maximum harvest:  guessing the dreaded “First Frost” date, when most warm weather plants die overnight, is both important and impossible in our challenging environment.  Last year (2019) we experienced a series of totally-unexpected killer frosts in late September and early October (even the professional weather fraudcasters were taken aback).  Will you decide to prune out all the baby squash and blossoms now, in order to focus the plant’s energies on producing ripe livestock food?  Will you leave the plants to their own devices, and hope for a late first frost?  Will you have “frost blankets” or pre-cut sheets of floating row cover (Ree-May ®, or Agribon ®, locally-available at Northwest Seed and Pet in Spokane) to throw over the almost-ready-for-harvest veggies and fruit, at the hint of an overnight sneak frost?  Here at Rancho McGinty, we employ options # 1 and # 3: early pruning, and heavy-weight floating row cover (frost protection down to plus 26 degrees Fahrenheit).

GARDENING CALENDAR:

Once again, I know of no nose-to-nose garden club meetings, classes, or tours this month, though there are a LOT of local on-line gardening resources:  our neighborhood garden club has instructive (and amusing) videos and comments on our club’s blogsite (www.elk-camdengardenkeepers.blogspot.com), and on our Facebook page.  Meanwhile, the Pend Oreille County Master Gardeners in Newport continue to offer free on-line gardening classes on their website (www.extension.wsu.edu/pendoreille/event).

That’s it for this month – keep watering those food-bearing plants, bushes, and trees, and remember to water and turn your developing compost bins and piles – at the end of the gardening season, all that dirt will need replenishing for a better than ever 2021 garden.

Weeding between the lines

By Jim McGinty


It’s warm out there in the garden, but the heat (one hundred degrees Fahrenheit or more) has yet to hit: the corn, ornamental squash, pumpkins, peppers, and tomatoes are all looking a little pathetic – for these tropical crops, it is NOT a jungle out there.

However, the cool weather crops, planted in late Spring, are almost completely harvested, and in some cases, eaten: turnips, cabbage, beets, kale, and broccoli have all been replaced with newly planted versions of themselves. Sustainable gardeners will remember to rotate plant locations, to avoid loading the same dirt with evil wire worms, root maggots, and various soil diseases. By September, the menu should again include fresh coleslaw, turnip frittatas, and steamed broccoli – “good stuff”, said the older version of the little boy who refused to eat anything that didn’t look and taste like sugar-coated, unnaturally-colored breakfast cereal.

Here at Rancho McGinty, the early potatoes, and the garlic are almost ready to harvest, while the onions and leeks are still weeks away from human predation.

My gardening partner, and full-time wife, Pat and I did learn a valuable lesson this last Spring, when the veggie seed racks in many stores were stripped clean by well-meaning first time gardeners. We implemented a basic seed saving program for our favorite crops: simple enough, we just tied paint can filter bags over the seed pods of our maturing second year onions, kale, and rutabagas. We also plan to save and overwinter bulbs from our turnips and beets, and we want to save and dehydrate some kernals from this year’s dent corn – the variety is “Roy’s Calais”, and the crop looks pretty good.

Out in the garden, you will want to keep those compost piles and bins wet, and it’s probably time to add some more fresh lawn clippings – the nitrogen in the grass blades will kick start a whole new batch of “brown gold” soil amendments.

Those potatoes will want to be hilled with more dirt, straw, or mulch to protect the escaping potatoes from turning green in the direct sunlight.

Speaking of protecting things from direct sunlight, you will want to guard your (hopefully NOT green!) skin out there: clothing that protects your tender epidermis from ultraviolet rays is inexpensive, and hiding in the shade during the hottest part of the day (the “sizzle” time) is a sure sign of intelligence – at least that’s what I tell my “can’t be a dedicated gardener without a deep tan” detractors.

If you are growing melons this year, this is a good time to place a hard, water-resistant object beneath the globe of goodness to prevent decay: a short piece of untreated lumber, a glazed tile, or a dog-chewed “Frisbee” will do the job.

If your bramble bushes or vines (raspberries, blackberries, etc.) have finished bearing, now is a great time to prune out those spent brown canes, leaving next year’s fruit bearing canes (the green, or blue canes) untouched.

Please remember that those devoted diagnosers of diseased foliage, the Master Gardeners of Pend Oreille County, have both an on-line and a phone answer clinic to provide sustainable garden and landscape advice: you can e-mail questions and photos to pomastergardeners@outlook.com, or call the illuminated ones at 509-447-2401.

Our local garden club is still following health department guidelines, which means no nose-to-nose meetings. We DO, however, plan a “virtual garden tour” this month of the growing fields of the “Backyard Market” – a home-grown, commercial fruit and veggie operation located just north of “Miller’s One-Stop” on Highway 2. To view July’s excellent virtual tour, and to watch August’s episode, you can visit our club’s blog site at elk-camdengardenkeepers.blogspot.com, or you can check out our Facebook page for more gardening advice: it may not be accurate, but it’s free.

Stay tuned for garden club news

facebook users?  please remember to check in at our garden club's facebook page (#elkcamdengardenkeepers) for updates on possible garden tours (another virtual tour in july, and maybe an actual outdoor tour in august are in the works), and other essential information.  i hope you all have viewed the june virtual garden tour, and if so, please comment/correct/admonish on facebook.  if you have yet to view the june virtual tour, please do so, as club videographer/facebook page manager geoff carson appreciates our feedback.

blog users?  please remember to comment on the postings, photos, virtual tours, and/or my spelling.  our blogsite (elk-camdengardenkeepers.blogspot.com) is there to keep us connected in these uncertain times.  our club blogmeister su chism goes to great efforts to make our blog posts both fun and educational.

oh, and keep pulling all those weeds - if you are currently weed-free, please let me know, as i have a few i can spare.

thanks, jim

Take our first virtual garden tour!

The first garden tour of the year is here!

COVID-19 is not keeping our club members from exploring our neighbors’ gardens. Thanks to club president Jim McGinty and videographer Geoff Carson, we can all step through members Marlene and Stephanie’s pristine and productive garden.

Check out the metal and wood raised beds, the hoop houses keeping heat-loving veggies happy, and the young fruit trees.

And check back here at the blog, or our club Facebook page, for the next tour!

Weeding between the lines

By Jim McGinty

Summer 2020 is officially here, and the garden and orchards are exploding with green leaves, baby fruit and veggies, and (sigh) lots of weeds.  One of the nice things about the “unified” gardens and barnyard here at Rancho McGinty, is that our weeds become food for our goats, sheep, and chickens.  Our chickens lay eggs with dark orange yolks from eating all the greens, and our four-legged “petting zoo” residents really enjoy their treats – I would like to say that all those wheelbarrow loads of handpicked weeds cut down on our feed store bill, but that’s a pipe dream.

For those of us who would like to control (as if we could!) the weed takeover, here is a time-tested recipe for a vinegar-based weed killer/controller (though I sometimes think the weeds are just amused by our efforts):  combine one gallon warm white vinegar (store-bought is fine), 2 cups Epsom salts, and 3 tablespoons liquid dish washing detergent (“Dawn” brand works really well).  Spray on offending greenery, and watch the little devils shrivel and … we’ll see.

This recipe is courtesy of local garden club members Marlene Routt and Stephanie Routt, who also hosted our club’s first “virtual garden tour” in June.  As we cannot legally assemble for outdoor gatherings, this event was filmed by club member Geoff Carson, and will soon be available to other club members and the public – stay tuned for details.

Other notes:  long time readers of this gardening column will undoubtedly remember my seasonal mini-rants on organizing, inventorying, and buying garden seed before those “out of stock” notices show up on your shopping list.  This Spring, of course, a whole lot of us discovered that all the new or returning gardeners bought up transplants and seeds meant for US!  So, I will again ask everyone to check the status of their seed supplies, as I continue to hear that seed suppliers are already predicting shortages in many crop varieties.  This is also a good year to learn how to save seed from the varieties you enjoy – for the most part, seed saving is easy, and there are literally hundreds of “Youtube” videos on the topic, though my favorite book on seed saving is “Seed to Seed”, by Suzanne Ashworth.  ‘Nuff said.

Out in the garden, now is the time to watch for signs of insufficient water or nutrients.  When checking the plants (something I do daily), I check for soil moisture content by poking my pointer finger (the “Mark I Digital Moisture Meter”) down into the dirt alongside a sampling of the row, and if there is no sign of wet/moist dirt, it’s time to irrigate.  Underfed plants usually show limp or weak or yellow leaves (though there may be other underlying causes – just to make life fun for us gardeners!), and a good foliar drenching (spraying the leaves until the solution runs off) of your favorite plant juice (“Alaska” brand fish fertilizer, “Miracle Gro” if you are so inclined, or even homemade manure tea) may be indicated.  Long term fertilizing methods might include poultry poo (we use chicken house floor scrapings which include the aforementioned poo, pine shavings, and dirt), commercially-produced 10-10-10 fertilizer, or some of the organic “Gardens Alive” (513-354-1482) plant specific products (my gardening partner Pat and I really like using their “Root Crops Alive”, and “Tomatoes Alive” powders – makes for great potatoes, beets, tomatoes, etc.).

If your June-bearing strawberry plants have produced their last berry, now is a good time to fertilize the plants, or if you have ever-bearing plants, now is NOT a good time to fertilize the plants, unless you want a LOT of ornamental strawberry leaves – best to wait until mid-season.

As you empty garden spaces of cool-weather plants (broccoli, cabbage, etc.), now is a good time to fill in the areas with warm-weather plants (lettuce, other salad greens, more basil, more green beans).  You may want to re-fertilize those areas before planting, based on how hungry were the cool-weather crops.

In the fruit tree orchard, now is the time to finish thinning the baby fruit, such that they do not knock into each other during high winds, and damage/bruise their branch mates – bruised fruit = rotten fruit.

Remember to check daily for aphid infestation on the tree leaves, especially the tender new leaves, as the sap sucking aphids can really ruin a harvest.  I use this spray mixture, applied once a week for three weeks:  combine one gallon of warm water with two tablespoons of Neem oil, one tablespoon of liquid dish washing detergent, and one or two teaspoons of diatomaceous earth (NOT the pool grade of D.E.).  

GARDEN CALENDAR

Our local gardening club members are hoping for the opportunity to gather for a garden club tour this Summer, and I hope we will be able to legally do so, maybe in August?

Meanwhile, those persistent plant propagators, the Master Gardeners of Pend Oreille County are offering on-line and “Zoom” gardening classes.  You can check for class details on their website:  http://extension.wsu.edu/pendoreille/gardening, or you can call the extension office in Newport at 509-447-2401, for more information.

Our local gardening club also has current (?) information on growing food and flowers in our area of the world, and you can check back here at our blog or at our Facebook group page.  We hope to have our June “virtual garden tour” video up and running soon-ish, so please check out those two club resources.

I can see ripe, red strawberries growing in the garden, from my office chair, so it’s time to harvest, and, just maybe whip up some milkshakes – blueberries are next, then blackberries – I do love being a gardener (and a consumer of homemade milkshakes J) at this time of year.