Good times in the melon patch

Inspired by a surprising volunteer cantaloupe in last year's garden that produced three nice-sized fruits we decided to expand our garden efforts this year by starting a melon patch. We chronicled the actual process of starting the patch back in May on this blog.

Since then we planted watermelon, pumpkins and two types of cantaloupe. Oddly enough I don't like watermelon, pumpkin, or cantaloupe, with the exception of Diane's pumpkin cheesecake bars, but growing them has been a hoot.

I had hoped to get plant some daikon radishes with the idea that their penetrating roots would help break up our clay soil, but that didn't happen. Fortunately our plants did very well anyway.

Our seeds sprouted nicely and the plants took off as you can see in this photo:

We've had a lot of fun searching through the foliage looking for ripening fruit. The first things to fruit were the watermelons. We planted Sugar Babies - a smaller variety that produces round fruits that are dark green. They are supposed to get up to eight pounds, but ours probably topped out at about five or six. Not too bad for our first go at it. Here's a pair on their way to ripening.

When we sliced open our first melon I was stunned at the number of seeds inside. Another lesson was that we need to harvest a bit sooner - many of the seeds had actually started to germinate inside the melons, which I thought very unusual. I'd never seen this in any fruit or veggie, but perhaps it's more common than I realize.

Slicing into our first melon - the tomatoes are from our garden too. I don't know where the dirty dishes came from:

See what I mean about the seeds?

My wife reports that the fruit was quite sweet; seedless varieties would give us less to pick out, but some flavor is typically lost as a trade-off. These look a little "rindy" to me - as in there's more of the white part than I'm used to seeing, but maybe that's because I'm used to seeing storebought melons.

The cantaloupes were next to ripen. Unfortunately most of them seemed to ripen at the same time, which happened to coincide with our beach vacation. When we got back a lot of our cantaloupes were goners. Here are young versions of our two cantaloupe varieties:

I didn't really know how to tell when they were ripe, but my dad suggested that they were ripe when they fell off the vine. He is not a gardener so I don't know how he knew that but he was right. When they're ripe they literally fall off the vine right into your hand. The variety in the top photo, we'll call this one the non-lobed variety, ripened first and I hear they were quite tasty. Mr. O ate a bunch of them almost by himself. When we got back from vacation we had a couple of the lobed fruits that weren't rotten but we haven't had a chance to slice into them yet.

The landmark achievement in this year's summer garden is the production of real, honest-to-god pumpkins. After many years of unsuccessful efforts we have finally grown bona fide pumpkins. We don't have a ton and they aren't going to win any ribbons at the state fair, but just having orange pumpkins in the garden is a major success. Unfortunately when we got back from vacation I noticed that one of them was covered in squash bugs. With each new success comes new challenges.

Upon closer inspection I noticed that several fruits were hosting young squash bugs. To try and deal with these things I cut several fruits from the vine, gingerly carried them into our chicken coop and brushed the bugs off into the chicken's litter where they were immediately gobbled up. Unfortunately a lot of the bugs escaped either as I was cutting the fruits or as I was carrying them to the coop.

I had actually seen squash bug eggs and some adult mating action going on in other parts of the garden, but at that point I wasn't sure what these critters were and whether or not they were beneficial. Now I know and next year I'll hopefully be able to deal with these things before they get out of hand.

Despite the learning curve of understanding new crops and new pests our first-year melon patch has been a great success.

Tomato damage, from an unlikely quarter

As I looked down on the garden from my second-floor bedroom window the morning of father's day I had a bit of a rude awakening in the form of damage to several tomato plants. We've experienced the damage done by hornworms, aphids, and other critters and creatures, but this was something new.

Sometime in the night or early morning hours the top of a sweetgum tree had come crashing down across our fence and landed on top of several beefsteak tomato plants. I let out a small sigh and thought, Now here's a garden chore I hadn't anticipated.

Here's what they looked like once I had cut up and removed the tree and straightened out the cages:
Fortunately the fence broke the tree's fall enough that the plants underneath were salvageable. The tomato cages also helped absorb some of the impact. Some of the plants did lose a few stalks and some small fruits but a month later they're all making a comeback and doing just fine. We're finally starting to get a few ripe tomatoes.

Pests and a predator

Despite possible appearances to the contrary things are not always rosy on our suburban North Carolina homestead. Just when we think the garden looks great and all the plants seem healthy and happy along come the pests.

Aphids are always an issue with our tomato plants and this year has been no different. How they find us and how they manage to get to the plants I do not know but they always appear, multiply, and suck the juice out of our plants. A couple seasons ago they were so bad that we had to try something more extreme than the normal dousing in insecticidal soap, which seemed to have no effect on the creatures other than to make them slippery. After some web searching we decided to give lacewing larvae a shot so we ordered some from Planet Natural. They arrived as eggs that we set out in the garden just before a week-long beach trip. When we got back the aphids were gone. These dainty insects are of course harmless to humans but they spell doom for aphids.

This year I have seen several adult lacewings flitting about the garden so I'm hopeful that our initial planting of eggs has resulted in a thriving colony of these aphid munchers.

Another encouraging sign of aphid control is the increased number of ladybugs we're seeing on our tomatoes this year. We're trying to teach our three-year old son that ladybugs are a beneficial insect so any that we find in other parts of the yard get transported to the garden.

Unfortunately the aphids aren't the only things that have harrassed the tomatoes. A few weeks back I was finding small caterpillars - maybe 3/8" to 3/4" long - on several of the plants. I'm not sure what these were but they had almost black bodies with two parallel yellow/green lines running the length of the body. They weren't doing extensive damage but were eating some leaves. We collected these caterpillars by hand and offered them to the chickens who eagerly scarfed them up.

Of course we've also had a few hornworms but thankfully these were found, plucked, and also turned into chicken food before they destroyed an entire plant. It's amazing what these things can do to a tomato plant in no time. The best way I've found to spot these guys is to look for their droppings, which are also apparently called, "frass". Their droppings are dark brown to black and have a sort of kernel-like texture. The dark color helps the frass show up easily against the green of tomato leaves. Once you see the droppings look for the hornworm to be somewhere close by - usually a few inches higher up on the plant.

Here's a shot of a new pest that I think might be a strawberry leaf roller. Anyone have any experience with these? This is our first year with strawberries so I'm not as familiar with their pest species.

While these pests are certainly doing no good to their host plants our chickens have benefitted from their presence in the form of tasty snacks. However, the chickens have invited a pest of their own, a predator really, in the form of a black rat snake who has been stealing eggs. This is gardening related because the chickens eat scrap produce and turn it into droppings that get mixed with their bedding and turned into compost that goes in the garden where the whole process starts over.

Here's the snake making his getaway after an egg run:

I trapped him once and released him deep in our woods. No good. He came back the next day and ate everything laid that day. The next time I found him he was actually camped out inside the chicken coop digesting the day's eggs. I trapped him again and this time drove him to a natural area next to a county park about three miles from our house and released him. We've had no egg stealing since.

Potato barrel project

A few weekends back we finally got our pumpkin, cantelope and watermelon seeds in. We planted those seeds in a very steady rain on a Friday after work. It was actually kind of fun. The following day we got our potatoes planted - not in the ground but in our old half whiskey barrel.

I thought that it would be too difficult for the potato roots and such to make much headway against our native clays. I also think that the clay would hold too much moisture and cause any potatoes that formed to rot. My mom and nephew had grown potatoes successfully in a half bushel basket several years ago.

The theory behind this method is that the shoots you cover up essentially revert back to root status and the plant is forced to grow upward once again to find the sunlight it needs. By raising the soil level this way (in increments) the plant is able to continue growing without suffocation, at the same time creating a longer tap root than when planting directly into the ground. With the longer tap root many more lateral roots can develop and each lateral root can then produces potatoes (at 3-4 levels rather than the normal single layer). So, this method should solve a soil suitability issue and hopefully increase yield.

My mom said that the harvest was easy - just knock it over!

I looked around the internet and saw other ideas that were very similar. I was hoping to come up with an aboveground growing process that involved free or cheap materials. I asked about bushel baskets at our farmer's market and was told that they are hard to come by and they wouldn't sell me any. I saw that you could use old tires - set one down and fill with soil and the seed potatoes and then keep layering soil and hay until you needed another tire and so on. That idea was not welcomed by the other adult in our household, who has a lower threshold for trashiness than I do.

I had hoped to do several separate potato plantings but since I couldn't come up with anything besides using our whiskey barrel, space was limited. I think it'll work and I am just excited about trying a new vegetable in our garden. So we drilled holes in the bottom for drainage.

Next we added a bit of compost and soil.

We placed the seed potatoes in and covered them with a layer of chicken poop-infused hay and then more soil from Mount Weed. We'll add more hay and soil layers as the shoots come to the surface.

I'm pretty sure that we planted too many potatoes in there but well, we had them. There are fingerlings, red potatoes and some blue potatoes. We don't usually eat that many regular potatoes - sweet potatoes are lower on the glycemic index and just a lot better for you, so we tend towards those. Maybe next year we'll try to grow some sweet potatoes, depending on how things go this year. Anyway, hopefully we'll get a good enough harvest this year so that our son and I can make some blue gnocchi!

From lawn to melon patch

A big project I had planned for this spring was to expand our vegetable garden possibilities by building a new, smaller bed next to our existing vegetable plot. This new bed will hopefully give us room to grow cantaloupes, small watermelons, and with any luck a pumpkin or two. We got started on the new bed this past weekend. Our method of starting a new bed is quite similar to the method Gardenaut Joshua McNichols described last week.

Here's how our process worked for getting this new bed started.

We created a border out of pine logs from trees that had fallen in one of the forested sections of our property. Fortunately this section is slightly uphill from the garden site so I was able to enlist gravity to get these logs to the site. Once they were close enough I just had to do some nudging to get them into position.

The next step was to mow the grass inside the bed with the mower on the lowest setting.

With the grass mowed it was time to lay down a layer of newspaper to help kill the grass and control weeds. My mom came over as we were working on this and brought us three bags of grass clippings from her yard. We typically wet the newspaper whenever we're building a new bed to keep it from blowing all over, but in this case I thought the grass clippings would do the job and add more organic matter to the bed as a bonus.

Once the newspaper and grass clippings were down it was time for the secret ingredient: Composted horse manure. It's no secret that this stuff makes things grow. I picked up about two cubic yards of it for $10. In the past I have found it for free, but had to drive three times as far to get it. My current source is only about 10 miles from my house so the $10 charge is worth it. I recommend craigslist if you'd like to find a source for this stuff close to you.

I'm glad I don't do this for a living.

To finish things off I added a layer of topsoil. A few years back I had about 10 yards of topsoil delivered that I thought I was going to use to fix up parts of my patchy and lumpy lawn. That hasn't happened, but the pile of topsoil is still sitting there.

The guy who sold it to me told me it came out of an old cornfield. The pile hasn't been covered so weeds have sprung from it to the point that my mother-in-law refers to it as "Mount Weed." With shovels and wheelbarrow we dug into Mount Weed for the bed's final layer.

Getting the topsoil in was fairly hard work. Mixing it in together with the horse manure wasn't any easier. The picture below shows about where we are with the bed now.

I really liked Joshua's method of sowing a cover crop in a new bed - particularly the use of the Daikon radishes since our subsoil is hard, red clay. I'm hoping the taproots from the radishes will be able to penetrate that layer and give the roots of future plantings a path to follow. I'll keep you posted on the progress of this bed and what level of production we're able to get this first year.

The beginning of another year's garden

It doesn't look like much now but my 2008 vegetable garden is officially underway. Eighteen bell pepper transplants are in (Red Beauty), as are 18 tomato plants (Roma, German Johnson, and Beefmaster). I picked these up at our local farmer's market, which is only about 2 miles from my house. I'd love to grow my own seedlings but I actually don't have a great spot to do that in the house - maybe a small greenhouse is in our future?

We picked up seedlings of the crazy tomato varieties I described in my first post but they're still pretty tiny and will likely need to be grown out a bit before planting. But that's ok. One thing I've noticed with tomatoes in our area is that even plants that are supposed to be indeterminate tend to wither and fade out by mid-to-late August. September and October are still prime growing months in our area of NC so if a few plants get in the ground a little later it may just mean an extended harvest - that works for me.

In addition to transplants we've also done some direct sowing of cucumbers (two varieties, but I can't remember the names), beans, and some peas. It's probably way too late for the peas to do much but that's ok. If they work out, great; if not, so be it. We'll learn something either way.

One of the most satisfying things about putting in this year's garden is seeing how much our soil has improved over the years. After four years of dumping as much organic material as we could get our hands on into the garden we're starting to see a terrific payoff. Our garden soil is dark and easily workable, it seems to hold water just right - it stays moist but is never soggy. The best thing we ever did for our garden soil was to put in about 4-5 cubic yards of composted horse manure. Wow, this stuff is really fantastic - and cheap!

Still to do in the garden is plant zucchini and basil and run soaker hoses up and down each row of plants. Once the hoses are in by the tomatoes I'll set a tomato cage around each plant. I use farmer's wire field fencing to make cages. I had a big roll of the stuff left over from a fencing project and decided it would be perfect for cages. I cut the bottom-most horizontal strand of wire off each cage and that leaves 6 or 7 vertical pieces of wire to serve as stakes to keep the cages anchored in heavy winds. The cages were cheap to make and are effective and durable - this will be our third season using them. Wire from the same field fencing also makes great stakes for holding soaker hoses in place. Using these stakes allows me to keep the hose right on the ground and right next to my plants.

One of my favorite things about gardening, and something I look forward to every season, is the daily ritual of coming home from work and checking on my plants. I check on everyone's progress and note who's thriving and who needs some attention. I usually don't see much change from day to day but over a season's worth of daily tending I've witnessed the growth of another year's garden.

Suburban Homesteading in North Carolina

Greetings fellow Gardenauts from Raleigh, NC. My wife, son, and I live on three acres in the city limits that we affectionately call, “Sourwood Farm.” We group our activities here under the heading “Suburban Homesteading” and producing some of the food we eat is central to the homesteading lifestyle that we like to cultivate.

Gardening in central North Carolina is probably not as difficult as it is in many other places but it's not without its challenges. For one our weather is notoriously capricious. Despite the fact that we've already had 80 degree days this year there is a frost warning for tonight, which also happens to be our supposed frost-free date. Go figure. The natural soil here is also a challenge because it isn't soil - it's hard, heavy, practically impenetrable red clay. Another issue for us is water. For about a year now we've been enduring our worst drought on record. According to the local newspaper we've past the extreme drought stage and have moved into the "exceptional" drought stage, which doesn't really capture the severity of the situation for me. It sounds more like, "Hey - great drought!"

Despite these challenges we can't wait to get started on another year's vegetable garden. We actually got some seedlings this weekend and were going to put them in but decided to wait. Given tonight's forecast I'm glad we did. Here's a look at what's likely to be growing in the garden once the weather settles just a bit.

I always grow a lot of tomatoes but I have to admit that I haven’t been as daring in my variety selection as I could be. I usually stick with what works – German Johnsons, Sweet 100s, Homesteads, etc. – nothing fancy really. This year is going to be different. This year a friend of mine has started all kinds of crazy heirloom tomatoes and has promised me a baker’s dozen seedlings from this group. Check out some of these names and descriptions:

• Aussie Tomato: "Large Australian heirloom plant producing big yields of 1-2 lb. red, meaty, beefsteak tomatoes that are somewhat ribbed." Now that's a tomato, mate! I'm hoping Paul Hogan will read this and agree to autograph some of my fruits.
• Dagma's Perfection Tomato: "Deliciously flavorful with overtones of tropical fruit. Firm, juicy and elegant in the mouth, and jewel-like in appearance." These should go well with my gold tooth! I've actually never heard of anything described as "elegant in the mouth." I'll let you know how that turns out.
• Flamme Tomato: "A delicious full-bodied flavor that literally bursts in your mouth." As long as it doesn't burst into flames in my mouth we'll be in business; that would be very inelegant.
• Kellogg's Breakfast Tomato: "Juice and inside flesh have the same bright orange color as orange juice." Plus each fruit comes with a flimsy kids' toy inside that is a serious choking hazard!

I'm also excited to grow bell peppers – big meaty ones that actually have flavor to them unlike the pricey ones we've been getting at the grocery store all winter that taste like water strained through grass clippings. Every year our peppers have been getting bigger, thicker and more productive. Hopefully this year that trend will continue.

A Lovely Pumpkin Blossom from 2007 that Never Became a Pumpkin

Beans and cucumbers of some sort will no doubt find their way into the garden this year. Last year we grew yard-long beans and boy did they go nuts. We also grew Kirby cukes and ended up making pickles out of some at the end of the season. The pickles were OK initially, but got soggy after a while. I think some of the cukes were not as fresh as they could’ve been and our pickling method was also probably not the best – we'll be on the lookout for a better recipe this year.

Mr. O. Hauling a Load of Cukes and Zucchini from 2007

A big item on the to-do list this year is to start a new, smaller veggie patch next to our existing one. We're planning to experiment with watermelons and cantaloupes in there. My inspiration for the new patch was a volunteer cantaloupe plant we had in a flower bed last year. I had never grown cantaloupe but when I saw this one taking off with virtually no encouragement from us I thought why not try to actually grow more of these? To be honest I don't even like cantaloupe, but my son and my wife do and I found it terribly satisfying to watch my 2.5 year old son scarf down big wedges of juicy cantaloupe that was grown on our property.

We're looking forward to sharing our gardening adventures from NC's piedmont with the Gardenaut community and hope to learn a bunch from all the contributing gardeners and Gardenaut readers.