The New(est) Beds - Part 2

For Part 1 - see here.

I have completed and planted two beds outside of our fenced backyard area now. The new ones are officially called "the barn beds".

The soil mixture we used ended up being a purchased top soil - mainly a grayish brown clay, mixed with cow manure compost, humus, and some of the remaining planting mix that we had from other beds. Into each bed as I was mixing up the various components I gave a healthy shot of a high nitrogen fertilizer as, hopefully, a one time thing to get it kick started.

Everything seems to love the mixture and is growing well. The first of the barn beds that I completed is producing well. Okra, tomatillos are abundant, and the eggplant and blackberries are growing well. My Malabar spinach is just about ready to start harvesting too.

The second barn bed has been finished maybe a month, so it was getting kind of late to do much in the way of a spring planting. We put cantaloupe and honeydew melons in one end, and the remaining parts of the bed received a cover crop of black-eyed peas.

I hope to get out there this fall once the weather has cooled a bit and build at least one more bed....we still have plenty of top soil remaining.

Okra

We have been harvesting okra now for around a month. I started some Clemson Spineless seeds early, and thus have an early start on production. I also sowed some different varieties directly into the ground after setting out my transplants.

In addition to the Clemson Spineless transplants (shown in the photo), I also have a few plants each of North South Hybrid and Cow Horn. I can't wait to see the Cow Horn pods as they are supposed to reach 10-14" in length and be prolific producers (best harvest length is around 6").

The North South Hybrid variety has been a big aphid magnet thus far, and periodic washing down of leaves and insecticidal soap applications have been necessary. Otherwise, the plants have done quite well with just minimal care.

Favorite okra preparations:

-grilled: just a little olive oil, salt and pepper and grill them until tender.

-sauteed with tomatoes: start by chopping and sauteing onion and garlic, chop and add a few tomatoes (we use Roma), maybe throw in a green pepper (we use Pablano) and add a little chicken or beef stock if there isn't enough liquid. Season with a little salt and pepper. Cut the tops off the okra and slice lengthwise (and crosswise if they are long pods) and toss in and cook until tender. We also like to throw in some cut up smoked sausage - and you have a whole meal in a pan.

To save some seeds (and money) for next years crops, just allow a pod or two to remain on the plant at the end of the growing season. When it has dried out, clip it off and store in a paper bag in a cool dry spot over the winter. Break it open to plant with next year.

Beets - a winner in the garden

Our first beet crop is winding down for the year. I'd say it was mostly successful. After adjusting the nitrogen levels in the bed they were in they grew pretty well. And, for being a person that had never really experienced beets before, they were quite tasty....and useful.

The tender young greens were a nice raw addition to salads.

The larger greens were good cooked as mixed boiled greens.

The roots are, of course, good chopped raw in salads or cooked in a variety of ways.

Our favorite cooking method for them, so far anyway, is to peel and slice into thin pieces and saute them in a little butter until tender. Sprinkle with a bit of garlic salt, and man, they are tasty.

We grew Detroit Dark Reds and a mix called Jewel Tone that included golden beets and Chioggia, which are really nice looking with interior rings of pink and white.

Beets will be on the garden calendar for the future.

Eat Your Ugly Veggies

The supermarkets are loaded with gorgeous fruits and veggies, grown on large commercial operation farms and cared for using traditional fertilization and pest control. My backyard garden, on the other hand produces some...umm, how to put this...'quirky' looking veggies. Sometimes malformed, lots of times bug or bird bitten. But what about nutrient value versus the big stores better looking selection.

the marketplace today rewards farmers for yield and disease resistance in their crops, not for how much of these beneficial micronutrients a crop may contain.

Mitchell’s team has also been investigating whether organically grown fruits and veggies differ from those produced by conventional farming.

Her team compared identical cultivars grown on certified organic plots versus those where standard fertilizers and pesticides were being applied. And as a rule, organics far surpassed their conventionally grown kin for vitamins and beneficial micronutrients, such as the antioxidant flavonoids quercetin and kaempferol, Mitchell reported

She also thinks she knows why that is. Plant nutrients tend to fall into two broadly defined categories: primary and secondary plant metabolites. We know the first category better. It includes fats (or oils), carbohydrates, amino acids and simple sugars. The second group includes the phenolic acids, flavonoids, alkaloids and terpenoids.

Conventional farming has optimized its practices and crop amendments to maximize a plant’s production of the primary metabolites. These are the ones listed on food labels. However, plants normally have a fairly balanced ratio of both primary and secondary metabolites: the primary ones don’t dominate.

And that makes sense, Mitchell points out, since many of the secondary metabolites are defense compounds — essentially a plant’s natural pesticides or sun screens, for instance.

When plants aren’t stressed, they produce fewer of these compounds. But the relative paucity of plant-protective agents available to organic farmers means that crops on their farms tend to suffer more damage from pests and the weather. And they respond by revving up production of defensive secondary metabolites.

The extra stress that organically grown plants typically experience may lead to less attractive veggies — like spinach greens with a hole in each leaf. But the resulting nutritional value of each gram of spinach from moth-eaten plants can be superior.

And so it is, maybe my backyard veggies with their less-than-perfect forms are better and more nutritious than Big Farm produce.

Links:

To above article
To Alyson Mitchell website and website

Raising catfish

Okay, so they aren't a part of my garden, but they are something we are raising for personal consumption, so I feel the desire to put in a post about the little guys.

We have a pond, or as they are more generally referred to in Texas, a stock tank, a couple of hundred yards from the house. When full to the brim it measures close to 4/10's of an acre...but it is rarely full here in drought country...and so is more like 2/10's of an acre most of the time. When full it is probably 8-9' in depth but, as above stated regarding usual size, is about 4' in depth now.

I stocked the tank with 150 channel cat in February of 2008. They were little, being about 4" size. But the things grow quickly if they are fed. I fed them at the beginning of the summer of 2008 regularly but quit in the middle of the summer when it was so dry that the tank became really small...too many mouths for such a small area. This spring we have had some rains, even some decent rains, but very few with much runoff, so the tank is up a bit, but still far from full. I am feeding and hoping that I can get them to harvesting size soon...to lower the population in the pond and increase the population in the freezer!