The Pilgrims aren't going to make it through the winter

[LowKey]

In the spirit of the "practical skills" queries...

Every once in a while I have a garden failure and it gets you to thinking, if I had to survive the winter, now what do I do.
This year it was a whole series of things gone wrong, starting with a load of composted cow manure that was so spent it was useless, to missmarked mail order seeds, to two weeks of steady rain.

Today I had to rototill under about a third of my garden.

I'm sure I could have salvaged the missmarked beans, if I'd been paying better attention. Supposed to be Yellow Romano bush beans, it soon became apparent they were pole beans. I put up a fence for them, hoping for yellow romano pole beans (just as good) but the flat green pods didn't turn yellow, at first, and when they did, the were huge inedible gnarly nasty things. I did manage to salvage a potful of the younger green ones when I ripped them out. And had I thought about it harder, I might have let the gnarly things go to dried beans instead of composting them.

Because the beans were pole beans, the fence they were on shaded one bank of cucumbers. The vines mildewed and died. The second bank of cucumbers, because of the rain, swelled to round orange baseballs too quickly. I can use these for sweet pickle chunks by peeling and scooping out the seeds, but these are usually kinda mushy and not as good.

The pumpkins and winter squash, planted on raised beds built over a layer of composted cow manure, are not growing vigorously enough. The manure I got didn't have a good strong smell and looked like it had been cut with something, maybe chopped leaves, but that observation was sort of after the fact. When even the yellow summer squash do nothing, you gotta wonder. Checked and the pH was totally wrong. Too acid. I've corrected with wood ashes and the winter keepers are coming along better but might be too little too late. The summer squash didn't make it.

And the weeds. The rain helped those along very nicely. I also had to take a weed wacker to the paths to tame the clover I grow there.

On a good note though, I have onions and beets coming along. Lettuce is petering out cuz of the heat but has been doing great. Carrots are almost ready. There are tons of tomatoes and I did get about 24 packs of string beans put up in the freezer last weekend, with the second planting coming on. I also have a row of hulless-seeded pumpkins in a new garden started this year. The soil there still sorta sucks (not enough compost material) but they seem to be starting to run.

Tomorrow, I'm going to do an emergency planting of beans and summer squash (seeds in reserve) in the empty plots. I put some 50-day pea seeds on the outside fence today too. We'll see if we can beat the frost.
I always keep some seed in reserve. It's a good practice for just such occasions. Should have made the decision 2 or 3 weeks ago though. I've got barely 65 days to Oct 1 when the hard frosts start.

[oldtrap59]

Clay. Been doing tis garden thing now for years and still seems that each year it's still a crap shoot. As we are trying to become more and more self supporting here each season these little problem like you list here become a bigger deal. I do have one big advantage though. In my part of the country a second chance usually comes in the fall and even the winter when we raise most of our cole crops. Even though we had a very good year in the garden we have started our fall garden already. Just planted 300 feet of green bush beans and 20 hills of yellow and patty pan squash. Also 30 maters. By the end of august we will put in cabbage,boccoli,carrots,lettuce,spinich and some other things.
We did have some failures too in the spring-summer garden though.(always do) This year that was mostly the melons, which we can live without.

Hope the fall crops work out for you.

Oldtrap

[hunter63]

Timing is everything........was on the road in May for a month, so many things that get planted here in zone 5 are either in, peas, radish, lettuce, onions, and the first crop of beans.......
Mothers day is more beans, corn, cukes, squash, and a couple of tomatoes and peppers.......but save some back for Memorial day had frost hit a few times.

Too wet and cold, say nothing about sore knee and gout, everything got delayed.....then upon return,... headed out to "The Place" for spring opening and first mow....late again....stuff up to my pits.

Returning home late June, weeds high as well, weed wacked them down, then mowed.....have several bags of last years leaves to till in when it cools down....guess I have to do some raiding this winter to get by......LOL.

Good thing I like going to the farmers market.

[Rick]

I guess that's why you can and store more than you'll need over the winter. To take you into the second season's harvest. Of course, we have that luxury today, the Pilgrims didn't. Those Ball canning jars and All American Canners were few and far between in the 1600s.

[Highhawk1948]

maybe the local natives will help out at Thanksgiving.

[LowKey]

Who? The EBT crowd. No thanks.

[Winnie]

Had some disasters here, too. I would starve if I had to rely on what is growing this year. No offence, but I'm glad it's not just me!

[Highhawk1948]

you missed it. You know Pilgrims/Indians. That's how the pilgrims made it. Assistance from the all ready there locals.

[ClayPick]

I keep three gardens, two on a slope and the biggest one on flat ground. Beans where a big problem this year also. My first two plantings on flat ground rotted out from all the rain. I had a bunch started indoors that I planted a few weeks ago and they’re doing great and developed enough that they can handle a good soaking. If I was subsistence gardening I’d have plots wherever the ground was naturally fertile and lots of them, like not keeping all your eggs in one basket. Most plants make a ton of seed so they can handle predation and environmental stress, my way of thinking is to try everything I can do to help them out. My 4th planting is chemical gardening in buckets.

[senna]

try mulching, pard. retains moisture, holds down weeds, soft on the knees, too. :-) about 6" of hay mulch is needed. If possible, put it on the ground a year or so before you want to plant there. Doing so will enrich and soften the soil, often making it unnecessary to till it before planting. Be sure to add some earthworms too. There's a great book about this, by an 80 year old woman, written many years ago. Your library can get it for you.

[LowKey]

Hay mulch is full of weed seeds. Plus there is this:
http://www.caes.uga.edu/applications...ory&pk_id=4791

^That doesn't just apply to using hay as mulch but also to using manure from animals who have eaten hay from sprayed fields or grass from sprayed pasture.
You have to ask these days if the farmer is spraying their pasture or hayfield before taking either hay or manure. It sucks. At least they don't get too offended any more. Usually. Mostly.

I use rotted hay (from a known source), stuff that's been sitting for at least a year in the weather, and mostly only as winter protection for the cranberry bed. It's easy to blow the chaff off in the spring with a leaf blower. And the funny thing about crabgrass is if you can keep it under control, even on the dryest of days, it can still somehow form enough dew to water itself overnight (if I was still a plant biologist, I'd figure out what genes cause that instead of weed killer resistance). If kept under control I've found some plants to benefit like winter squash, but not onions though. But right now there is some purple-leaved fuzzy thing growing out there that is trying to take over. Never seen it before and it's defying my key books. Looks like some kind of Chenopodea but smaller and far more insidious.

I grow the clover in the paths because it is a nitrogen fixer and because it shades almost everything else out. Except that fuzzy purple thing.

And when I want to start a new plot, in August I cover it over with about 6 inches of non-smelly well rotted horse or cow manure and cover that over with chopped leaves and a cover crop of something that will die in winter but hold the stuff in place, alfalfa or annual clover for the nitrogen. In the spring it gets tilled under and peas and beans go in the first year. After that it gets manure trenched once in three with a succession that works with that.

[gohammergo]

More than ever now we have to be adaptable. Our garden is crap this year. Spring gave us a late start. Then it was cold and wet, then it went to miserable hot and dry, and then switched back to cold and wet. Had to fire up the wood stove this morning. Incredible! We usually have a good garden output. Sometimes very good. The past few years though have seen weather extremes like never before. No moderation, no multi week stretches of decent weather. It's been air conditioning one day, and the heater the next. So, what we are going to do is go to raised bed garden next year, smaller beds like maybe 2' by 8' or so. I'll build a frame on it, and if we get cold weather we can put plastic on it, more or less like a mini green house. In decent weather we can roll up the plastic. Too much rain, put it back down. Easier to weed. I have used raised beds before, and it seems more user friendly to weed each "small garden" than to look at the 50' x 100' garden and think about weeding that. Since we can't control the weather, rain, heat, etc. we need to think on a different scale. We CAN, somewhat, control the weather on a smaller scale, a mini greenhouse micro climate. Some plants that need more heat, we can keep sealed up more, plants that need shade can be shaded, etc. You get the picture. If we had to depend on the garden this year we would not be eating so good.

[ClayPick]

We can’t tap sennas infinite knowledge any longer but the 80 year old is Ruth Stout. I have one of her books from back in the 70’s. Mulching doesn’t work for me as it makes a home for earwigs and slugs. I hate to admit it but i get a very large yield from a limited amount of space by chemical gardening. Luckily I enjoy turning ground and weeding. It helps one understand the soil better.

[Rick]

I have a bagging mower so I use the grass clippings as mulch. It keeps weeds down, conserves water in the soil, keeps the soil cooler in hot weather and when they decompose they add nitrogen back to the soil. I also mulch the excess and add it in as dirt.

I chuckled at Senna's choice of hay. He's obviously never used it. Straw isn't bad but I've had hay sprout on it's own still in the bale. It can be a real pain in the garden.

[randyt]

I used a bunch of old hay for mulch a few years back. It was baled hay that was left in the woods for a spell. It was all hot and slimey when I cut the strings and pulled it apart. The best mulch I ever used. My corn grew 8 feet tall that season, corn generally don't get that tall in my area. The leaves on the summer squash was as big as bushel baskets. Good yields too.

[Rick]

The heat and age probably killed the seeds. Grass can get pretty warm if it's thick and unable to get air. Since hay is nothing more than grass with the seeds it's going to sprout if any of the seeds are viable. I sometimes get sprouts from grass clippings but since they sprout in mulch it's pretty easy to pull.

[randyt]

I figured that as well. It worked well, so well I'm going to throw some bales of hay in the woods and let it sit. When it's popping toadstools it's ready for mulch.

[ClayPick]

Rotten hay is full of nitrogen fixing bacteria just like compost, cheap to if you don’t mind the wait.

[LowKey]

I usually get my old hay in spring. Previous season hay is real cheap or free if you wait until after the first cut starts coming in. Only problem around here now is they are making those big haywheels instead of bales. I use the bales as a windbreak around the cranberries for the winter.
Don't buy construction hay bales. Not unless you plan to wait quite a while for it to rot. And you run a really good chance of introducing Poison Ivy to your place. They don't care where they cut that stuff. Also beware of anyone that says, "goats love it". Probably has brambles in it as well as poison ivy.

[ClayPick]

I’m starting to reap the rewards of my bean crop. Transplanting saved the day. This spring was so poor that direct seeding would have taken me into frost before there was any yield. I am starting to plant spinach seed amongst the bean plants now and every five days. It’s the only way i know how to hit the temperature and day length window where spinach does real well.

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