Black Friday Garlic, Again

Black Friday Garlic, Again

I planted garlic yesterday, November 23rd (Black Friday).  Coincidently, I did this last year, when the Black Friday temperature was 66 degrees and quite pleasant with the soil warm and soft.  This year was a different story. The ground froze early, and like last year, I was left waiting for a warm spell.  That warming almost always happens in either late November or early December but this year it didn’t happen yet and the forecasts looked bleak.  I was faced...
Compost 2018

Compost 2018

I finished my compost pile yesterday. It snowed last night.  The pile is already warmer than its surroundings and it’s only two days old.  The internal temperature of the pile when I took this picture was 60oF, outside it was 29. I learned to build these structured piles from my son Geoff who years ago was a horticultural apprentice on a biodynamic farm.  Geoff taught me a lot of practices used by excellent growers who approached gardening using sustainable...

Hot Sauce

I made almost two pints of hot sauce using three different chili peppers:  A standard Cayenne, a pepper we just call 3″ Hot, from seeds from a plant my neighbor gave me years ago, and a couple handfuls of little Thai hot peppers. The Thai peppers are the plants that look like a little Christmas tree, loaded with tiny extremely hot peppers. Normally I wouldn’t use these little peppers, and I won’t again. They are just too small to be worth the trouble. But...

The Last Watermelon

We had a great watermelon harvest. This is the last of over a dozen fruits we picked. Among the varieties we grew were Crimson Sweet, Alibaba, Moon and Stars, and  Orangeglo. Most were quite a bit larger than this one. Of course, they all ripened at nearly the same time, so we have been gorging on melons for the last several weeks. This one turned out to be close to perfect inside and exceptionally sweet. I’m getting better at judging ripeness, but I still made...

Japanese Beetles

Japanese beetles, along with a lot of other other natural disasters, are making the garden a little less fun this year.  The beetles have only been in Wisconsin for about a dozen years, and they are loving it here.  Their populations seemed to diminish for a few years, but this is the worst infestation I’ve had. They’ve not bothered the sweet corn before, but this year they are destroying some silks. Most years I can keep up with them by just collecting them...

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