I am proud to say I will be eating our last fresh spuds and carrots from 2009 today. How great is that? It’s July 2nd, and having given up buying bread, we’ve had our glorious Yukon Gold taters for lunch five times a week for the last nine months. If it weren’t for our big disaster mid-winter – where we lost over half our crop – we’d be eating them till this year’s came out of the ground.

I gotta say, I’ve often wondered how eco-friendly our country garden is when we have to drive out there every week during the summer to plant, weed, water and harvest. But comparing that to how much eco-friendly, locavorish benefit we get compared to people who eat bread (with all their vehicle travel and the producers’ not-so-ecologically sound practices) I’m feeling pretty good about the CO2 emissions of my gardening labour and our concomitant lifestyle.

So cheers to me and my tater patch. Even when I half failed, I totally succeeded. Nine months of meals is pretty awesome. I’m now working on the other three months.

The biggest pumpkin (topmost) is 30 lbs. I managed to bring them all in before the frost. They’re now using my hydroponic lights to ripen.

I started eating that giant tater today. That’s a quarter beside it, for scale. It’s going to take about four days of lunches to finish it off. It’s snowing right now, but I still have at least 300 lbs of spuds in the ground. Apparently, this weekend it’s going up to +15, so I should be able to get them all. My potato bin is almost full. There’s about 600 pounds of spuds in it already – and a hundred of carrots. God knows how it’ll all fit.

I did a little gardening this morning, bright and early. In the city, around 6:30, it had apparently finished spritzing long enough ago that the sidewalks were dry. But when I got maybe, ten miles out of town, the unsteady drizzle started and I began to question whether I shouldn’t turn around and head out on a dryer day. But I persisted, and I’m glad I did. When I got out there, the rain was so mild, it was easy to work without getting soaked.

Part of the reason I went out today was to check the state of my spuds, which you can see in their ample quantity in the pics above. When I got back from hilling them more this last Saturday, I was reading on the Web that over-hilling could stunt production. That just freaked me out. I have never not hilled like crazy, and things have gone really well. Since spuds grow off of the stems rather than the roots, the higher the hill, the greater the yield. Some of the plants I nearly buried and I wanted to brush some of the soil off before they flowered.

Anyway, when I got out there, it was pretty obvious my imagination had exaggerated how much dirt I’d been able to toss on them. As you can see, if you click the pics and view the guy-gantic versions, there’s tons of foliage above the soil line.

In the foreground, you can see my drought-year attempt at growing carrots and beets. What a joke that is! The largest plants (all ten of them) popped on time, leaving vast expanses between them, which I then reseeded in parallel rows a few inches from the originals. Then it decided to rain. The original seeds popped as well as the new ones. So now I have double rows of carrot and beet sprigs, which should yield some juicy fingerlings come fall. Gack.

The spuds are going to rock this year. The drought actually helped keep the weeds down. I was a smarty-pants and put popsickle sticks in, every second spud, so I knew where to weed. By the time the taters sprouted, there wasn’t a weed to be found and I could continue to water and weed with gusto.

The second crop has been planted

Ambitious romaine lettuce

I planted my second crop this last Friday – that’s four days ago – and already I have one inch high plants. How the heck does that work? Is this some kind of super fertilizer-coated genetic mutant seed, or what?

This time around, I planted six pots of romaine lettuce and ten pots of spinach. It seems that about five times a week we have a spinach salad at dinner, so why not grow what we use. I consider the leaf lettuce thing a failure. It was just too limp to be worth eating. So if butter lettuce turned out like damp toilet paper, the tougher romaine should turn out as tender as butter lettuce.

I ended up keeping the cinnamon basil from the last crop. It’ still producing just fine and with the latest pruning, it could turn into quite the little bush.

 

 

Not bad with the leaf lettuce. The broccoli and the cinnamon basil I’m going to consider a failure. The butter lettuce is still going to take a week or two to be worth eating. But over all, I’m happy. Tonight we dine on the first salad from the garden!

Oh, and this morning I was finally able to till our country garden. It’s has been so wet up until now that even walking on it was prohibitive. I spread wood ash over it before tilling. I heard from a pro spud farmer that ash will solve our rough skin problem.  I hate peeling potatoes, so hey, whatever works.

But it’s looking pretty freakin great. A bit of grass roots came up with the till, but no dandelions and zero weeds. I’ll be going out again this week to till again..

(Leaf Lettuce)

{Basil, left; Broccoli, middle)

(Butter Lettuce)

The lettuce is finally really to eat, but I’m going to wait till the leaves are at their maximum size before cutting them. They say each plant will produce for six weeks, but that still may not be enough to last us if we eat a salad every day. I think I’m going to to have to cut out the broccoli and maybe ditch the butter lettuce for something bigger, like romaine.

Butter Lettuce (right, front)

Broccoli

Leaf Lettuce (middle)

Every day I go into check on my little garden I have two reactions – almost simultaneously. “Wow, look how much things have grown in 12 hours!” And, “What? Still can’t eat anything yet. Hurry up!” But really, I have nothing to complain about. My little garden is doing extremely well. Today it’s time for the second nutrient change.

The only thing I’ve done to help things along is fire up a small fan to keep the air circulating. When a couple of the butter lettuces seemed all floppy, I tried googling “hydroponics” “using a fan for stem strength”. Not surprisinglyu, I got a ton of pot growing pages. But I did find out that it worked – if I didn’t mind the plants spending some of their growing energy on stems instead of leaves. So now, the fan stays on the full sixteen hours that the lights are on each day.

Broccoli

Butter Lettuce

Cinnamon Basil

Two weeks after planting, ready for a water and nutrient change, my little garden is doing quite well. The broccoli is exploding. I expect it’s going to pop right out of the pots when the stems thicken. I was surprised to see how slow the basil is compared to the lettuce. And yes, cinnamon basil, whatever the hell that is. I just grabbed it in the store not knowing it was an exotic variety. I’m happy to try it. It’s only two plants. It should make some fine pesto.

The first sprouts have popped over the edge of their containers. The first brocolli leaves went from white nothing this morning to green mini-leaves this evening. And every pot has sprouted. How much time was that? Three days? Crazy… At least now I know I measured the water and nutrients correctly.

Did I mention I dumped the water in without measuring it? Duh… I wasn’t going to pump it out and throw it away, so I calculated the volume in cubic feet and converted it to litres. What else is junior high school math for, anyway? Um… let me get back to you on that one.

Here’s my new hydroponic garden setup. The tank is 120 liters (32 gallons) and its filled to 88 liters.

The thing that took the longest to set up was the frame for the florescent lights. They have to be maintained at 4-6 inches above the tops of the plants throughout their growth. So I came up with a spiffy mechanism to raise and lower them.

As you can see, string (mason line) is attached to the light’s horizontal wooden frame. The string goes over the vertical frame and is tied to the dowel (just below the top bar). The dowel is held in place by nails at the back of the frame. There nails are at 2 inch intervals.

Just for perspective, the lights are 46" long and the vertical frame is 36" high.

Right now, the whole righthand two thirds are planted with lettuce and the right third is brocolli and basil. I’ll post more pics as this thing gets going.

I had a six-pot system about 15 years ago. I tried growing everything green in it, but eventually settled on lettuce and basil as the most practical. The basil leaves got to 6" tall four or five inches wide. That’s each leaf! I was snipping individual leaves for salad for a month or six weeks, easy.

Now I’ve got an 18 pot system.The idea is to be self-sustaining in greens all year. The guys at All Seasons Garden Centre, where I bought the system on Monday, were extremely helpful. I asked them how much power this thing would draw (2 lights, one submersible pump). I was concerned we’d end up with a $20 head of lettuce. They did a quick calculation and said it’d cost about $10 a month in power.

Compare that to the cost of a month’s worth of salad greens from the grocery store. And that’s consumer cost plus hidden costs, like government subsidies and environmental costs.

One lettuce plant will produce for 30-45 days. For us, there was about thirty seconds debate over whether to buy a garden or not. The cost for the garden was about $350. That’s everything included, organic nutrients , pH test kit, pump tuning, seeds, everything. The frame set me back about $70.