Onward

Things are s tarting to look serious now. First flats are out of the greenhouse and into the cold frames. In this case lettuce and onions. Since it insists on staying cold and damp only the hardiest sorts are going out so far. Things like tomatoes and peppers are safely snugged up inside.

Many, Many Kinds

Well, here's Joel again, this time getting ready to plant the first tomatoes. This first planting of 20 varieties will go into the hoophouse. Our hoophouse tomatoes are our insurance policy tomatoes. We are subject to late blight here if the plants get too damp for too long at the end of summer so the hoophouse keeps them nice and dry. Some years we also get an outdoor crop but other years they succumb before anything gets ripe.

Why do we grow so many varieties, 50+ lettuces, 20 tomatoes. Well there are a number of reasons. First, it's fun. We love what we are doing, we are interested and intrigued by plants especially vegetable plants and just have to try new varieties every year. There are so many out there and we always want to know what they taste like, look like, how they grow. We just don't get tired of trying new things. And that way we find new varieties that grow better for us than the ones we have been growing.

But biodiversity is also very, very practical. Not only do we grow a lot of varieties of a specific vegetable but we grow a lot of different sorts of vegetables. That way no matter what nature throws at us in the way of weather, bugs, diseases, etc., some of it will survive. Then not only will we continue to make at least some money, but we will have something to eat.

Our customers like a variety of kinds of their favorite vegetables. If we only grew one kind of lettuce we'd have a lot fewer lettuce sales. People will buy 2 or 3 or 4 heads if they are all different. Like me they like to make salads that look pretty as well as taste good. My favorite late summer salad is a Greek salad of tomatoes, peppers, onions, basil and feta. I use every color of tomato, pepper and onion to we have. A feast for the eyes as well as for the palate.

In spite of it continuing to be cold and wet instead of warm and sunny (sigh) the garden is beginning to be planted. Joel put out the first 2 flats of little lettuce seedlings today and covered them with row covers o give them a bit more warmth and keep the golden crowned sparrows out of them. Those little birds love to eat small vegetable seedlings.
Then he put in a bed of spinach.
And, to my great delight, the sunflowers I planted in the hoophouse as an experiment in early flowers are staring to come up.

Boxes of Things To Do

Joel picked up two UPS boxes from the dockhouse yesterday. Above is our 30 bunches of onion plants from Dixondale Farms. that's about 2500 plants. Today they go in the ground.
And a box of rug warp so I can get going on the wool he just spun.

When can we eat them?

This winter was so very hard on the garden. I hate to admit it, but we have been buying lettuce at the grocery store. Sigh. But there is hope. Today Joel moved the two flats of new little lettuces from the greenhouse into the cold frame to start hardening off. i planted asters, ornamental amaranths and ageratums in the greenhouse to replace them.
In the hoophouse the peas are coming up. We are trying to grow them there to see if we can thwart the golden crowned sparrows who have decimated the small pea plants almost every spring for several years.
It is warm enough at night for the frogs to start their spring singing I found this one under a board in one of the hoophouses.

So it Begins Again

The year is beginning to pick up speed. About time. I get tired of vacation after a while as much as I appreciate it at the beginning. So while I was in the studio working on a set of green rag placemats today,
Joel was out in the greenhouse planting the first flats of lettuce. He did say something about questioning the sanity of someone who has seeds for 70 varieties of lettuce. But lettuces are so beautiful, and tasty. And he grows them so well.

Squash

We came home this morning from a couple of days in Friday Harbor to find that several nights of real frost had killed all the tender things in the garden. The squash vines, the zinnias, zuchinni, pumpkins plants and any tomatoes and peppers not covered with row covers were toast. This meant it was time to bring in the winter squash. Only a few of the fruits were actually touched by frost and we will eat those right away before the frost damage can cause rot,
but we found that the rats had gotten into several squashes, especially a new to us one called Uncle David's Dakota Dessert Squash famed for its sweetness. If the choice of the rats says anything these must have been doggone tasty. I think we got one to try for ourselves.
With our usual good help we brought in several wheelbarrows of squash to stash in Siri's room in the attic and sell and eat all winter.

Warm Weather at Last

The weather has finally turned hot and sunny after a long cold and wet spring and early summer. The warm weather vegetables are so pleased. You can almost see the basil and squash and pumpkins growing. Joel got the last of the hoophouse tomatoes tied up today and we had a few little Sungold cherry tomatoes in our salad tonight. It won't be long before there are lots of the

The Season Progresses

Our very first lettuces are almost ready to eat. Alright, we robbed the cradle and had one for dinner last night. We will have a few bags of lettuce mix for Market this weekend and in a week we should have actual head to sell. Yippee!!
We have been setting out transplants. The soil is finally drying out enough. Above are little statice plants that I set out last evening. Joel has been putting out all sorts of brassicas and 3, 60 foot beds of onion seedlings. We hope to have LOTS of onions this year.

Greens in the Hoohouse for Opening Market Day

Tomorrow is the opening day of the weekly Farmers market in Friday Harbor in the courthouse parking lot, 10:00 to 1:00. We'll be there every week until the middle of October.

Above, Joel is harvesting some of the tender and sweet Asian greens and mustards in the hoophouse. It's full of things like You Cai, Yokatta-Na, Miike Great Wave mustard, and Bau Sin, spinach and arugula. I'm also bringing my rugs and hats.

Lots of Peppers, and Tomatoes

I've said before that we like to grow lots of varieties of various vegetables and peppers and tomatoes are no exception. Here are some of the little pepper and tomato plants in the greenhouse. Growing lots of varieties has its practical sides as well as well as being more fun. We can make a much nicer display at the market with various colors and shapes, hot ones, sweet ones, ones with just a little heat, thick walled for salads, thin walled for frying and drying, etc. It also means that if the weather is less than perfect, that is, the usual sort of weather, we have a lot of different responses to it in all the different varieties. It does mean that we spend a lot of time picking up the labels out of the garden in the fall. We make our labels out of white plastic yogurt and cottage cheese containers. A good way to give all that plastic a bit more time before it hits the landfill.

Winter Market

It never ceases to amaze us how much there is out there in the winter garden. A week of warmish weather let the kale and chard start to grow again. It's about the end of the Brussel's sprouts, but the over wintering cauliflowers are starting to come on. We dug the last of the parsnips and had a few beets and carrots and lots of leeks. Next month we expect the purple sprouting broccolis will be producing and the kale will have started to make flowers buds or napini.

Winter Squash

Yesterday Joel and I brought in about 500 lbs. of winter squash. Winter squash are a bit magical to me. You plant these little seeds or small plants in rows 6 feet apart in late spring. By the middle of summer they have spread out so that you can't see or walk between them and the vining sorts are trying to escape the garden or are wandering into the beds next to them. And you can't see whether or not they are setting any fruits. Until a frost comes in the fall and kills the plants. Then suddenly there they are all over the place. We really had no idea what a great crop we had this year. Above is one wheelbarrow full of maxima types squashes, Sweet Mamas, Sunshine, Nutty Delica. We had another one full of delicata types and pie pumpkins and one of acorn types. They'll be stored upstairs in Siri's old room and feed us and our customers all winter.
The long ones in the foreground are Long Pie pumpkins. Reputed to have come originally from the Azores in 1832, and grown for years in Maine, they are one of the best tasting pie pumpkins. Ready to harvest when there is an orange spot on the bottom, they turn a lovely pumpkin orange color in storage.

San Juan County Fair

We've been running back and forth between home and the San Juan County Fair in Friday Harbor this week but I thought I stop for a minute to share my onions that I entered in the Fair. They got a blue ribbon but got aced out for Best of Class by some really, really nice garlic. I'll have more photos from the Fair when I slow down next week.

I'm Reunited with my Camera

No, I haven't disappeared into the ether. I just got separated from my camera and then had all three of my girls come to visit with their families and blogging just didn't happen. Now my camera and I have been reunited and we are hunkered down surviving the heat and the vegetables are growing. The melons are loving the heat. Our Scoop II plants are, as usual, the first to set fruits.
The hoophouse tomatoes are beginning to ripen in quantity. So far we and the families have eaten almost all of them but this weekend we expect to have some to sell. These are Sungolds the best tasting tomato we grow. My three year old granddaughter, Iris, just loved picking and eating them.

Rain and Our First Tomatoes

I got rained out of my Roche Harbor booth today and as Joel was in town giving a talk on winter gardening grabbed a ride home. On the way home we passed Nob Island looking romantic in the rain. We came home to harvest the very first tomatoes out of our hoophouse from a variety called Stupice (stoo PEACH ka).
Joel made a great salad from those two tomatoes, Green Ice lettuce, Red Candy Apple onions, basil and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese.

The garden is loving the rain.

More planting

Our main summer garden is in an area that is really wet all winter. So we can't plant over wintered crops there. We have to wait each spring until the soil dries out enough for planting. Well, today we got out there and prepared a bunch of beds and planted sunflowers, potatoes, onion sets, Red Fyfe wheat and some black garbanzo beans that we are trying for the first time. Starting Sunday we will get a bunch of flower seedlings that are sitting in cold frames waiting for the ground to be ready in the ground. I have flats of stocks, asters, annual sweet william, statice and godetia ready to go.

Wool Rugs

I've finished all the placemats and yesterday started on the first batch of wool rugs. These will be all light grey wool on a linen colored warp. I have bags of washed skeins sitting in the studio and I wound a bunch of them onto quills to put in my shuttles. James III wanted to help.

And then I started weaving. The Cotswold fleeces are a mixture of shades and I love the way the variations work out in the weaving. There is enough warp for 5 rugs and I had finished 3 by this evening. The next warp will be black yarn and dark grey wool and the final one (for the time being), an off white one with white wool.

And we planted parsnip seed this afternoon.

Overwintering Vegetables

Ah, we are finally getting warmish days and nights that are staying above freezing (even occasionally above 40) and the plants that survived the winter are responding. Here are three of our standby overwintered vegetables. Above is purple sprouting broccoli.
And a variety of overwintered cauliflower. These and the sprouting broccolis are planted in June in flats and planted out into the garden in July. They grow all summer and fall, and hopefully survive the winter to start flowering in the spring. The taste is nothing like their summer counterparts. These vegetables are so sweet and tender.
Our real mainstay are kale buds. Napini is the term for the buds of any brassica, cabbage, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, collards, kale. Each taste slightly different but all are tasty nutritious spring treats. They should be steamed or sauted quickly as they easily overcook as they are so tender.

Spring at Last?

Yesterday was the last of the winter Farmers Markets. Three weeks from now we start back to the once a week outdoor market. Hope we have a few things ready to sell. Above is the first of the lettuces from the hoophouse to be ready. We added them to some salad mix from a friends farm as we didn't have enough ourselves. It was very satisfying to harvest that lettuce.
Today was the first day that has felt like spring. The thermometer even said that it got over 60 degrees. Whoopee! I spent the morning inside warping up a loom for potholders but went out in the afternoon and weeded most of a bed of biennial sweet william and helped Joel plant our first peas. We put in 4, 40' rows of Sugar Ann snap peas. The peach tree at the back porch is in bloom. The flowers next to the greenhouse wall have come out first as it is warmer there. What a lovely day.