Thursday, August 13, 2026

Recent VEGarden Posts
19 Jul 2007
0

The first fruits of …

Lack of labor? I haven’t been out to the garden much recently – I’m swamped with my other jobs. Chris has been spending a few days a week out there, but the weeds are starting to take over and we haven’t gotten rain for a long, long, long time… He did haul a hose over and water as much as he could. We keep hearing of rain storms both north and south of us, but nothing ever seems to fall here. Last Thursday I saw lots of flowers on our squashes, and a few small summer squash fruits as well. Chris picked three for dinner Tuesday – two small zucchinis, and a fairly good sized sebring summer squash. Unfortunately, my...
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02 Jul 2007
1

Tomatoes and Straw

Yesterday Jessi and I weeded around the tomatoes. The ground is quite dry and compacted. We added some compost on all the tomatoes and brassicas, but I am not too optimistic. A few rows still need some straw. Things haven’t gone how I imagined they would in my head, but I still think we will get some tomatoes out of the deal if little else. A lot of our tomatoes look really small while others are bearing fruit.
23 Jun 2007
2

Three weeks and counting…

I went on vacation and the garden became a bit… neglected. It was actually hard to tell where the weeds ended and the vegetables started. Unfortunately, just about zero three sisters (corn, beans, and squash) came up. I think it’s because of the soil – if the seeds did actually germinate, they probably died trying to push their way through the clumps of clay out to the sunshine. There are a few random melons and squash, and we’ll see if we can keep a few of them alive. Last week we got a truck load of compost, which we shoveled onto most of the transplants. I don’t know if we’ll have a chance to pick up more, but a truckload...
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29 May 2007
0

A long weekend

If my counting is correct, we got in 280 tomato plants and 300 brassicas this weekend. We still have eggplants, peppers, and okra transplants to put in. The southeast corner of the garden tilled up the nicest, so after the hard work digging holes and planting tomatoes, we planted a lot of seeds: onion sets, lima beans, and various squashes and cucumbers. Lisa came on Monday to help us again, and the work goes by so much quicker with a third person. Unfortunately, she is moving back to Duluth this week! I leave for a workshop in Utah on Thursday, and I’ll be gone until June 11th. So hopefully Chris will have time to keep this website updated… I want...
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26 May 2007
1

Slowly making progress

When we got out to the garden this morning, the guy who had plowed was out there with his tractor tilling for us. The ground is much more workable than it was before, and we’re lucky to have him helping us out a bit. Unfortunately, someone came by and ate a lot of the corn and squash seeds we had planted… and we can’t really tell what got eaten – there are just empty shells where pumpkin seeds once were, or pieces of corn with the germ eaten laying all around. SO… I think we’re going to have to add some more seeds back in, and maybe add more rows to the three sisters. Our transplants are sick of their...
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22 May 2007
0

So, you want to grow vegetables?

These last four days have been frustrating, exciting, skeptical, frantic, depressing, energetic, and hopeful. I told Chris that when we were done with this year he would be prepared to write a new book entitled something like So you want to grow vegetables on an acre of land, and decided to do this in the spring? Of course we didn’t think of this giant project in the fall, which puts us in an interesting situation. The ground would have been much easier to work if we had plowed last year, planted a few green manure crops and tilled them under, planted a winter crop, and then reworked it all again this spring. But, we are complete novices and stuck with...
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17 May 2007
0

The next step

That’s about a third – maybe even less than a third – of our seedlings. They have become family, and I hope they all make it into the ground. (Except for the okra in the very front left corner – Puck snapped it in half while running too close… oops!). I always forget the camera when we go to Morning Sky Greenery, but I’ll try to remember to bring it tomorrow. We started hardening off the tomatoes, peppers, okra, eggplant, and brassicas. They spent about 1 1/2 hours out in the sun and wind – sheltered as much as we could shelter them. Now we increase their time outside every day, and hopefully get the brassicas in the ground next...
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14 May 2007
11

A curious okra problem?

This is a bit odd. All of our okra seedlings are covered – very thickly – in these little clear gelly spheres. They seem like eggs, but the strange thing is that none of the other seedlings (including tomatoes, peppers, sunflowers, papaya, and eggplant) show any signs of the “eggs”. Also, we haven’t seen any insects. And these have been inside since they were planted – we’re just moving them outside to harden them off for the first time today.
13 May 2007
0

Ground Broken

Here it is! It’s amazing how much seeing something in a different light can completely change your perspective. Last week, I was staring and an open field of grass, imagining all of the wonderful food that would be appearing in a few months. Today we saw the garden tilled – and I got a real sense of how much work this was going to be, how much more we need to prepare before putting anything in the ground, and how incredibly giant our garden is. It looks disked – perhaps plowed before. Clare said that the guy was out there from around 6 until after 11:00 in the evening working on it. We will have to go over it with...
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12 May 2007
4

Getting Closer…

Sunflower Seedlings I got a phone call last night with the incredible news that our new till-guy was on his way out to prepare the garden! We met him out there Tuesday evening, and he had some good advice for us, and pointed out a low spot that will likely stay fairly wet. We haven’t gotten rain for a few days, so it was dry enough for him to till. We’re planning to go out today – we haven’t seen it yet! Chris’s graduation ceremony and after-party are today, so the pictures will have to wait. But at least we’re moving forward! I planted two flats of sunflowers (144 total) last week. We’re sending some of these home with our...
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10 May 2007
0

Lower Your Expectations

There hasn’t been time to properly plan or prepare for our big garden. I am graduating from college this weekend and need to study more yet. The other day I found a tray of peppers had been neglected and well over half ended up dying. No picture now – no time. So the new motto is, “Lower your expectations.” (I might yet switch it to “different strokes for different folks” which is also an important lesson for all of us.) Looking at seed catalogs made me a little excitable and its always easy to talk myself into doing something unmanagable. I may have bought more seed than I needed to. Our plot still hasn’t been tilled. After lowering our expectations...
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06 May 2007
0

A thousand plants waiting for a home

Here’s a picture of our dining plant room. It rarely looks the same two days in a row, with all the repotting and shifting of plants from the greenhouse and back to the greenhouse. We didn’t realize how impossible it was going to be to get someone to work only an acre of land. The farmers are too busy, and their equipment is too big for an acre. Most people just laugh and think we’re crazy. We have been playing a game of phone calls talking to people who can’t/won’t help us and then refer us to someone else who can’t help. I called Midwest Wildlife today, and he said he would come by and look at our acre on...
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05 May 2007
0

More Papaya Pictures

This post has nothing to do with our vegetable garden. But I am utterly obsessed with my papayas. I figure these are about 10 months old now, and after a good transplanting today they are happy in their new home. I started with about 15 papaya plants at the end of last summer and ended up with four. Two are Solo Papayas and two are Maridol Papayas – though I don’t know which two are which! I hope to start some new seeds this summer, but mostly I hope that these make it through another year. Also, I am hoping that they fruit. How neat to sell papayas at the food co-op with a “Minnesota Grown” sticker on them!
03 May 2007
0

okras

We are going to have lots of okras this year which is exciting and slimy. I hope there enough people willing to buy and eat them. We don’t eat gumbo ourselves, but I like fried okra a lot and we’ll have to find some other relavent recipes. Here is a picture of the some of the okras we have that are thriving. As you may have saw in an ealier post we had more okras prout that we knew what to do with. We ended up planting extra and giving some to Morning Sky Greenery. Sadly, with my finishing up college, (sadly, I have to finish up college) I haven’t had time to devote to our seedlings. I haven’t planted...
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02 May 2007
4

Listening in at a local hardware store

(picture of dandelions here) So I had to pick up some fuses at one of the hardware stores in town because we blew through all ours again and I picked up a little earthway grass/fertilizer/etc spreader while I was at it which I plan to use for cover crops. I thought folks might want to read the conversation I overheard: Customer to employee, “Whats the best thing to kill dandelions?” Employee, “Well…” Other employee nearer to me, “POISON!”, then after some manaical laughter, “they are about the most annoying things ever.” I think I will just file this under ‘we will have to agree to disagree’ and leave it at that because I can’t let the destructive culture that this...
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02 May 2007
0

Super Marmande Tomato

Seed Source: Ace Hardware (American Seed Company) Date Planted: April 7, 2007 Marmande is a commune in southwestern France, a known producer of tomatoes. They hold a festival every July to celebrate their tomatoes. One week into April, we realized that we had not bought and red tomato seeds! We were too busy focusing on fancy colored heirlooms, and completely forgot to plant one or two “standards.” I picked up some packets of Marmande and Delicious tomato seeds at a local hardware store and quickly planted them. It was very much an impulse buy, but I discovered later that the Marmande tomato is indeed an heirloom. Plus, Marmande is supposed to make an excellent market variety. We were a bit...
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02 May 2007
6

Sabre Ukrainian Tomatoes

Seed Source: Amish Land Seeds Date Planted: March 23, 2007 Amish Land Seeds claims to be the only US Source for this paste tomato! The Sabre Ukrainian tomatoes are very large paste tomatoes with few seeds. They get their name from the shape (think, sword). They are very similar to the World’s Miracle Tomatoes we have this year, but are said to ripen late in the season. We have 27 Sabre Ukrainian seedlings. View all tomato varieties
01 May 2007
0

Tomesol White Tomato

Seed Source: Amish Land Seeds Date Planted: March 23, 2007 Yes, another white tomato variety… three white tomato varieties, about 58 plants. But we are planting nearly 300 tomatoes, and these are bound to be a hit at Farmers Markets! The White Tomesol tomato is relatively new German heirloom that was recently introduced to the United States. According to seed sellers, the Tomesol tomato is just about the truest “white” variety of tomato there is. Many white tomatoes are more of a pale yellow, and often have pink spots on the blossom end. We’ll see how these ones grow up! We currently have 20 Tomesol seedlings. View all tomato varieties
01 May 2007
0

World’s Miracle Tomato

Seed Source: Amish Land Seeds Date Planted: March 23, 2007 We chose two paste tomatoes from Amish Land Seeds this year: Sabre Ukrainian and World’s Miracle. Both are from the Ukraine, and the grower says they look almost alike but that the World’s Miracle tomatoes are about half the size of the Sabre Ukrainian tomatoes. They are suppoed to be quite a bit earlier though. We ended up planting a standard roma variety just to boost our paste tomato yield a bit. We have 26 of these plants. View all tomato varieties
29 Apr 2007
0

straw potatos

Since it was Sunday we tried to take it easy, but I planted some potatos in straw next to the garden. Nigel ate a few when I wasn’t looking, but there are still plenty. We decided we’d plant all the potatos in straw on account of how clay-y the soil is. This is a picture from the other day so you can’t see all the old logs i put to mark the potato plot. Apparently, what you do is just put more and more straw on top of the plant and the potatos keep making more tubers. This appeals to me as I read One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuokaa few months back and that guy uses straw for EVERYTHING....
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