Garlic!
–Simon
Harvest 2023 – 1
CatsKills
I want to shoot neighborhood cats sooooo bad.
Rewind.
Okay, so I just don’t want cats on my property. I find this to be a very reasonable request. Yet, in the internet debate over cats being allowed to roam unrestricted outside, the arguments against this practice focus on the dangers posed to the cats themselves, which is still a self-centered argument, even if it’s on the against side. It overlooks what should be the prime reason: it’s rude to other people.
Even if letting your cat outside wasn’t inherently dangerous, it’s still pissing and shitting in my vegetable garden and digging things up. It’s being destructive to my property and hobbies, and potentially passing infectious diseases into the produce I eat. Under no condition would a rational person consider this okay.
And yet – there they are.
And it turns out that the problem was worse than I thought, revealed to me after my garden camera install.
…And that’s just one day.
But I’ve ranted about roaming cats before. No need to go through that futile discussion again. Instead, I decided to find a preventative measure that was more likely than changing a cat owner’s behavior.
Instead, I invested in a motion-activated ultrasonic alarm. I had limited expectations, but I haven’t caught any more cats on camera in the two days since I installed it! So I bought two more. It seems feasible that I can at last create a cat-free perimeter. The 3rd one I’ll run at a higher frequency and see if that does anything to the squirrels. That’d be a double win after last year’s tomato patch decimation.
And the camera worked for one of its intended purposes. I love it when a plan comes together.
–Simon
Winter Carrots
As I mentioned last month, I am on a gardening quest to extend the growing season.
In so doing, I’ve cataloged these extended growing times through observation and failure, have been largely successful overall.
I also mentioned Bambi, amusing in that it was these rampaging ravenous ruminates that forced my winter carrot harvest – probably the last of my phenologic experiments of the prior year. The goal was to dig them up at the beginning of March, at which point I would then plant onions and radishes in the newly-vacant and opened earth, just before the carrots started growing again and converting their sugar. If that were successful, I would have closed the gap entirely on the fallow period.
Still, I was close. I just need to…address the wildlife situation.
And make more stock!
–Simon
Phenology 2022
As a famous whitetail deer once lamented: “Winter sure is long.” And here in zone 6a, I would concur. The last week of April through the last week of October are the only guaranteed growing times for anything not frost-resistant, and even that’s a gamble. The remaining half of the year is reserved for watching it rain. It certainly gives the mind some time to contemplate self-harm.
But then I discovered something: Phenology.
In an applied context to gardening, it correlates planting times to what local native plants are doing. For example, when the crocus blooms, it’s time to plant radishes.
The benefit being, some vegetables can, in theory, be planted ahead of last frost, thereby extending the gardening season. The practice is entirely anecdotal, as micro-climates are too variable to establish a regional constant. The information available is therefore crowdsourced, making for nice little community of gardening nerds.
It also made for a fun experiment. And with a basic internet search providing corollaries to what I planned to grow, I was able to create my own planting guide. The dates themselves I left blank, as I would fill them in myself, noting whether the incidence was successful or not. And so, after one year, I have my own vegetable garden planting time reference index, specific to my immediate geography:
I intend to add more items, but for now the greatest revelation was that I could squeeze out a few more weeks’ growing time for peas and root vegetables. And with the carrots maturing earlier as a result, I was able to plant a winter crop far enough in advance of the hard freeze to yield some impressive roots.
So while Suicide Month will remain unchanged, I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that it’s the last month of the season that I can’t plant anything.
–Simon
It’ll Cost a Bundle
2 years prior, Liz planted garlic. We then harvested that garlic the following summer.
This year, that same garlic patch sprouted again. Apparently, not all of the seed garlic had been harvested. I’m new to garlic growing, so I’m uncertain if this is expected growing behavior or not. Regardless, we sure did get a nice bundle, however unexpected:
Maybe the trick is to grow in patches and harvest every 2 years. Or maybe it’ll come up again on its own. Dunno. Plenty of cooking to do in the meantime!
–Simon