Inge's Garden on the Home Front

Romanseco Cauliflower

 Normally I only write about Die Weide, but Inge's garden looks so lovely this year that I decided to devote a post to the the home garden Inge grows and maintains. (I get shoveling duties...) Inge bought three cauliflower plants at Red Barn Garden Center this year but the cauliflower heads that grew wasn't your white round head cauliflower. She ended up with two different cauliflower types, the Romanesco varietal above, and the Coconut varietal below. It will be very interesting to see how they taste!

Coconut Cauliflower

 Inge grew her own potato patch in the side raised bed this year. Her potato plants look way healthier and bigger than the plants I grew on Die Weide.

Inge's Potato Patch

 In the front bed below Inge grew the cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, onions, and some herbs. It's the first time we grew cabbage where the leaves curled into a head, instead of bolting.

Cabbage, lettuce, onions, cauliflower

We bought and planted the rose bush below because of its lovely orange-tinged blooms. This year she blooms and grows like never before. We've had it for many years, but the year we planted it we generously applied rose fertilizer in the hole and the rose nearly burned to death. It took years to recover but it looks great now! Inge, to this day, refuses to put fertilizer on anything due to the rose burn experience. We use a lot of compost and worm tea instead. I apply organic fertilizer, blood meal, and bone meal on the garden at Die Weide.

Orange Roses

This is a closeup of the orange rose bloom.

Orange Rose Bloom

The photo below shows the orange rose bush under the grape arbor. The grape vine looks really healthy in its fourth year in the garden and this is the first year it bloomed, hopefully meaning we get our first harvest of grapes!

Grape vine over and Orange Rose Bush under Arbor

First year the grapes bloomed

This bed once grew strawberry plants so thick you couldn't see the soil for the strawberries. There were blooms galore, indicating we would obtain a bounty of fruit. Then we got Penny, our chocolate lab. Within days, our cute ball of fur had dug the entire bed up and the strawberries were gone. The fence you see behind the strawberries was my solution to ensuring our garden wasn't destroyed by Penny. By next year, I am hoping that we'll again have a bed of yummy strawberries.

Strawberry patch, reborn!

Grapefruit Blossom

Lemon Tree Blossom

Lemon Tree in pot

Inge deposited all the hard-packed clay topsoil I dug up for the pathway in the triangle of trees where grass never grows due to deep shading. We planted a lot of shade tolerant plants and mulched to beautify our landscape further. We need to plant more grass up front too.

New landscaping in front of house

Weekly Spring Gardening Chores

Water Pump Setup

Nearly every weekend we head out to Die Gruene Weide to tend to Herbie, Inge's Donkey, and to tend to the orchard and garden. Because we don't have water available out there yet (oh, for some well drilling hands!) we bring water for the garden with plastic drums. Today we brought three drums totaling 180 gallons. In previous years we siphoned the water into two garden cans, each about 2.5 gallons, and hand watered everything. Talk about a lot of work! This year I decided to buy a battery operated pump and with this purchase, our watering chores became much more bearable! 

Orchard after mowing (blue tarp covers well drilling tool)

After watering the orchard, I mowed it and then snapped this photo to show the orchard at its groomed finest. We planted all six peach trees and one Mexican plum tree three years ago as sprig shoots so we still have a year or two to wait for production. Further back we bought two larger plum trees, and two larger apple trees. We planted the apples this year and both trees already fruited. I snipped most off to let the tree concentrate on root, not fruit production, but I left about three to five apples on each tree. Inge and I are curious to see how they come out!

Onions and Carrots

I've written about how good the onions look so I decided to take photos of each of the garden inhabitants, starting with the onions and carrots. The photo captions describe the rest.

Black-eyed Peas (4 rows)

Foreground Tomatoes and Jalapeno Peppers, Watermelon background

Front row - salad cucumbers, next pickling cucumbers, rest, Greenbeans

 Finally, below stands the potato straw bale experiment. I planted half the potatoes (two varietals) on newspaper like the video I saw and half the potatoes on the ground. (Mostly because I ran out of newspaper...) The potatoes placed on bare ground sprouted, but only a handful of one varietal sprouted from the newspaper plantings. Next time I try this I plan to use the broadfork to bust the sod, plant the potatoes on top of the busted sod, then cover with the straw. The bare-ground potatoes look pretty healthy.

Potatoes in Straw - not coming up well. Back by fence, Muscatel grape vines.

Garden Progress Photos

Garden, Planted and Mulched with Straw

Over the last few weeks we've worked to build a hopefully productive garden. It's larger than any we've grown before on Die Gruene Weide we put in a lot of work to fight against the persistent droughts we've suffered the last few years. The photo above shows the bulk of the garden which consists of (from the far end moving towards the camera, onions (looking luscious), carrots, black-eyed peas, tomatoes and watermelons (planted today), bush green beans, bush pickling cucumbers, and vine salad cucumbers, and the potato straw bale experiment. Shown in the below photo is the asparagus patch with 15 of the 16 roots planted successfully sprouted.

Asparagus Planted and Mulched with Straw

Three things we've done to fight the drought were to mulch the entire garden with wheat straw. All the yellow shown above and below shows the wheat straw surrounding all the plants.  This helps prevent soil evaporation. The second thing we've done this year is to plant all the row crops such that we can use flood irrigation between the rows. And finally we bought a battery powered Wayne PC1 12-Volt Water Pump which makes watering the garden and orchard far easier than toting water cans which we have done for the last three years. I also purchased two 55 gallon food grade plastic barrels to bring our water capacity up to 205 gallons until we get the water well finished. We only brought 180 gallons today as it had rained recently and we knew we didn't need the full capacity to water the garden.

Last we succeeded the most with the harvest of the black-eyed peas. We ate two very good meals and could have obtained one more but we didn't get it out soon enough. The squash also gave good results but Inge isn't a fan of squash and we had never grown it before with the result that we often harvested it after it had become too hard. So we didn't plant squash. This year I can already see the most beautiful onion plants I've seen in my life and we'll have to wait and see if the rest of the garden produces too.

Another Spring Bloom Blog + Extras

Moth on Mesquite

In addition to gardening chores, Inge and I strolled Die Weide where I looked for new blooms and other critters to photograph. I brought my 70-200 zoom lens in hopes of capturing bird photos, but the foliage density prevented snapping the few birds I saw. However, above I snapped a moth sitting on mesquite tree.

Small Orange Bloom

 The search for new flowers turned up a few new blooms. I know from walking the land in years past that finding new blooms won't be difficult as different plants bloom in different seasons, though late summer blooms taper off - either from lateness of season or the drought we've suffered the last few years.

Another small yellow blossom - leaves interesting too.

Tiny White Blossoms

This blossom is so tiny, yet enough of them grow to be visible. Below I held my index finger next to the bloom for perspective.

Finger Tip Shows Bloom Size Perspective

Repeat Curly Edge Yellow Blossom - better focused image

Mushroom in Straw - cap about nickle diamater

Bristly Pre-Bloom

Yellow Blossom From Previous Pre-Bloom

Moth on Berry Bloom - Snapped with 70-200mm zoom lens

Small Blossoms on Tall Stem

Yellow Blossom - opened further than last week.

Smaller Bristly Pre-Bloom

Spider Nest(?) surrounds tree limb

Pink Collar Deer Revisited

Doe with Pink Collar taken around July 2011

Back on July 24th, 2011 I posted a blog entry about deer tales and at the bottom of the blog I posted this trail cam photo of a deer that wears a pink collar. Today I saw our neighbor, Mike, and told him that I had a photo of the collared deer. Since I posted this photo some time ago, I figured to update the blog as I have captured a subsequent better photo of the deer and its collar.

Trail Cam Photo of Pink Collared Deer Taken Nov 2012 (Battery change reset date)

Finding places to place the trail cam where the donkey isn't the main object is hard because Herbert, the donkey, walks everywhere! But I found a tight little trail by one of the creeks that Herbie hadn't been down and placed the cam there in November, 2012 where I caught several doe pictures and caught another snap of the pink collared deer. Below I blew up the image to show the collar better.

Collared Deer Zoomed and Cropped. Black skull image and steel ring visible.

The photo below is as zoomed as I can get it with iPhoto. The doe's head is down browsing and her ear stands vertical above the head to the right of the pink splash. Her foreleg bisects the collar in the photo. To the right of her leg you can see the pink and black skull and crossbones symbol. To the left of her leg you can see the steel ring which looks like a key ring.

Pink collar zoomed as far as iPhoto will go.

As interesting as the pink collared deer is, these trail cam buck images caught my eye too. I've got some snaps of spikes and one with a forward bent semi-spike antler. But this cam shot shows a nicely built buck with a good quality rack. The photo was taken fall 2011. I've got another snap of him that didn't come out clear. He's really wary of the trail cam too.

Biggest Buck Yet

Biggest Buck Yet - full body zoom

Biggest Buck Yet - antler head & shoulders zoom

Red Hourglass in the Garden Straw

Black Widow Spider Playing Dead in Straw

Black Widow Spider Upright and Ready to Scurry Off

Today we visited Gruene Weide as usual with a list of things to accomplish. We planted nine tomato plants, six heirloom and three hybrid plants. We've been mulching all our garden (both house and land) with straw I bought a few months ago. So after planting the tomatoes, I grabbed a hay bail and rolled it into the garden from the hay loft. Inge grabbed the wire cutters to cut the bailing wire and just as she cut one strand she saw the spider shown above.

I brushed the spider off the hay bale where she landed upside down and played dead with the red hourglass prominently displayed. So I ran to the truck and grabbed my camera to snap a couple of photos. As often as I've seen black widow spiders, it's the first time I was able to get a picture with my macro lens! I used a piece of straw to flip it over to take a top-side photo too. She is so black and shiny I can see the outline of my reflection on her back!

Garden on February 4th 2013

 This year, in hopes of finishing the well drilling and having water available, we expanded the garden. It doesn't fill the entire space, but it does manage to fill about 70%. The piles of dirt shown up front consist of asparagus trenches with 16 root clumps planted. We planted straw bale potatoes in the yellow pile past the blank spot. Broadforked soil stands idle beyond the straw potatoes then at the far end, too small to see stands the very healthy onion patch where I planted seventy-some onion bulbs.

Garden on April 7th 2013

Green beans, cucumbers, black-eyed peas popped their first leaves above the crusty soil, popping a tiny crumbly soil lid aside in their reach for the sun. Today, the last of the 16 asparagus roots sprouted so we got the full planting to come up. Everything shows green everywhere this year because we received about two inches of rain in the last few weeks. We need more rain but for now the garden and the pastures and the woods all look vibrantly alive. Notice how the April photo appears so much greener than the February photo (naturally of course!) No bees have occupied the bee hive as yet and we don't see many flitting around the blooms either.

Trellis Posts Installed for Berry Row

Another chore started today involved planting posts with post hole diggers for the Blackberry and Raspberry row trellis. I planted three posts seen to the right in the photo and at a later date will install the rest of the trellis. In the foreground next to the black bucket stands one of the two apple trees we planted in February. (Both apple trees bloomed and have apples - which concerns me - I think a newly planted fruit tree should spend its first year growing roots, not fruit. Inge thinks otherwise so the apples grow, unpruned.)

Anxiously Awaiting New Critters

Top Bar Bee Hive in Construction

Last year I stumbled on a beekeeping book and decided Die Gruene Weide needed a bee hive. The pros are we get nature's best pollinators to help our garden and orchard produce more, and we get fresh yummy honey. The cons are the potential to get stung and work to maintain the hive(s). After evaluating the various bee hive possibilities, we decided that top bar hives met our desire for a closer-to-nature experience of bee keeping.

Top bar hives require more work than Langstrom hives and produce less honey, but from the videos I've seen and the articles I've read, the top bar beekeeping experience puts you closer to the bees. Everything I do with Die Weide has some production and enjoyment value, but not to the point of being obsessed with maximizing production. A dozen tree orchard and our garden won't support us, and neither will the honey we extract from our hive(s). I envision having an abundance of honey to share with family, friends, and neighbors with a bit left over to make a buck or two.

Above you can see the hive under construction. I built it last year, but completed it late in the summer when few blooms were left in the dry conditions so I postponed ordering bees until this year so they can have an abundance of blooms to extract their food from.

The picture below shows the finished hive awaiting new occupants. I found the fancy roof too tight and plan to replace the peaked roof with a waterproof plank cover of some sort. I had hoped the hive would self-populate but that hasn't occurred as yet so I have ordered and will pick up a package of bees the first week of May. I sure hope they enjoy their new home!

Bee Hive Awaiting Honey Bees