Archive for the ‘home kitchen garden’ Category
Have You Bought a Bee Hive?
Bees become active in the spring even as the very earliest flowers blossom. However, in zones 5b and colder, it’s best to wait until May to start new hives. A young colony will grow quickly when there’s plenty of food to gather nearby.
At then end of 2008, I vowed that Your Home Kitchen Garden would become an advocate for honey bees. In a recent post titled Home Kitchen Garden Beekeepers, I shared some of my childhood to encourage gardeners to become beekeepers. Since then, I had a conversation with my dad in which he agreed I could acquire some of his beehives and beekeeping gear.
I want to start a bee colony or two in my home kitchen garden in May. This means acquiring his gear, inspecting it and cleaning whatever is still usable, upgrading some parts to take advantage of improvement in bee culture over the past 30 years, and ordering bees so they arrive in early-to-mid May.
Bee Emboldened
Before my dad decided to raise honey bees, he knew almost nothing about them. He picked up a book or two and read… as did my brother and I, and he got his hands on a catalog from a company called Dadant & Sons. During maple sugar season, he assembled hive bodies and frames from mail-ordered kits, following the directions that came with them. My dad wasn’t a professional carpenter, but he made the assembly look easy.
Nearly all of our beekeeping knowledge came from those books, and from asking questions of neighbors and friends (one of my dad’s work associates was a beekeeper). You have far greater advantages. There are far more books about beekeeping available today, there are more manufacturers and suppliers than ever, and the Internet provides ready access to dozens of useful sources—including enthusiastic beekeepers who are happy to answer questions.
Did you know that an apple will form even from an unpollenated blossom? Unpollenated apples are much smaller than pollinated apples. Interestingly, sometimes a bee pollinates only part of an apple. When that happens, the pollinated lobes grow large while the unpollinated lobes remain small; you get a rather strange-looking apple as a result. If you raise bees, chances are that food-producing plants in your neighborhood will produce better.
Beekeeping References
In my youth, the standout books about beekeeping were The Hive and the Honey Bee written by L.L. Langstroth, and The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture by AI Root and ER Root. Both books have been around long enough to become seriously out of date. However, recent updates make The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture completely relevant (revision 41). For kicks, an old copy of The Hive and the Honey Bee (most recent revision was in 1992) is still a good read, but I’d look to more modern publications for serious guidance.
When you commit to beekeeping, get The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture and consult it often. But to get started, choose a book specifically written for beginners. I’ve added a section on beekeeping to Your Home Kitchen Garden store where you’ll find several appropriate books to help you get started. Also, biggerbooks.com has a decent selection of books about beekeeping.
Beekeeping Really is Easy
I’ve spent several hours in the past few weeks reviewing videos that give a clear understanding of basic beekeeping activities—and that reveal how simple beekeeping really is. I wanted a video that reviews the components of a modern beehive, that explains how to assemble the pieces, and that shows how to install a new package of bees. I couldn’t find one I like.
I did find several videos that, taken together, cover most of these topics reasonably well. The first, embedded here, is more of an advertisement for a beekeeping supply store than it is a robust do-it-yourself tutorial. Still, it shows a beehive unassembled so you have some idea of the parts you’ll need to nail together if you buy a kit through the mail.
Please have a look, and check back soon. In my next post, I’ll include a video showing the finer points of assembling components of a hive, and video in which a beekeeper installs a new shipment of bees into a fully-assembled hive.
A Home Kitchen Garden Off-Season Surprise!
I accidentally sprouted roots on a basil sprig, then planted it in a flower pot where it has grown very slowly this winter on a south-facing windowsill.
I’ve reported several times this winter about my answer to cold and snow: I have a small indoor home kitchen garden. That garden consists of two flower pots on a south-facing windowsill, and an occasional canning jar with fresh, young sprouts for salads and breads (I wrote about the sprouts in Your Small Kitchen Garden blog).
In my last post, I reported that I found box elder bugs wintering over in my indoor herb pots. This morning, when I went to water my herbs, I made another unexpected discovery: My basil is in bloom!
Three blossoms have emerged on my basil plant, and it looks as though more are on the way.
Accidental Basil
In October I had put some sprigs of basil in water to hold them after the first killing frost. Those sprigs happened to put out roots. I planted one of the rooted sprigs in a flower pot.
The basil has grown poorly. It got too little light, and the soil was too cool on the windowsill. Oh, and when I took vacation one week, the basil got miserably overwatered, resulting in a massive setback for the plant. Still, this morning I found three tiny basil flowers.
It was a great reminder of the coming springtime. I’m so jonesing to plant vegetables.
Visitors to my Indoor Herb Garden
I planted cilantro in a pot and set it in a south-facing window. I added a grow light, but did nothing to push back the cold from the window. Outdoors in summer, these plants would be at least shin high. The cold windowsill has slowed their growth; they aren’t even ankle-high.
My home kitchen garden just emerged from the ice pack that has covered it for more than a month. Even with the snow gone, the soil is frozen nearly rock-hard. That’s good, because February shouldn’t be a gardening month in central Pennsylvania… unless you grow things indoors.
In the doldrums of early winter, I grow a few things indoors. This winter, I planted a flower pot with cilantro seeds, and a healthy but small crop of the herb is growing on my basement windowsill. I also planted a sprig of basil that had rooted when I set a bouquet of it in water on my dining room table just before the first frost of autumn (I wrote about it in Your Small Kitchen Garden blog).
My Indoor Home Kitchen Garden is Pathetic
The bottom line: I’ve been a lousy gardener this winter. I put my meager plantings on a south-facing windowsill, which, I’ve explained in other posts (in Your in-Home Kitchen Garden, for example), is a lousy place for plants in the winter—unless you’ve provided extra light and heat. The winter sun isn’t enough for most vegetable plants, and 65 degrees Fahrenheit makes for slow growth; a central Pennsylvania windowsill in winter tends to run much lower than 65 degrees.
I did put a plant light over the herb pots, but the plants must think it’s early spring; they haven’t grown quickly in the cool air on the windowsill. Were I to harvest cilantro now, I’m afraid I’d kill the plants. That’s OK because I know they’ll grow faster as the days warm. In the meantime, my in-home herb garden has taken on new life: several box elder bugs lurk among its leaves.
At Least They’re Not Roaches
Box elder bugs were news to me when I moved to rural Pennsylvania; growing up in upstate New York, I’d never seen nor heard of these critters. However, during my first autumn in Lewisburg, I’d see hundreds of box elder bugs gather on the front of my house where the sun hit in the late afternoon. A few of them got inside each time we opened the door.
The box elder bugs that decided to winter over in my house have found their ways to my cilantro pot. It feels more like a home kitchen garden now that it has bugs.
Living in apartment buildings in Boston, I found cockroaches amazingly unpleasant. However, I quickly became indifferent toward box elder bugs. The few that winter over in my house ignore my food stores, they don’t reproduce in the house, and they don’t scurry into dark spaces whenever I turn on a light. In fact, I rarely see them—and I never see traces of them, though occasionally one flies by or crawls down a lampshade.
I guess the box elder bugs in my house are as fed up with winter as I am. I’m impressed that they’ve found the few food plants I’m growing, and I’m letting them stay. My indoor herb garden feels more like a seasonal outdoor garden now that it has insect critters scurrying about in its leaves.
Please enjoy these other articles about growing herbs:
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SCHWOIT » Blog Archive » Easy To Grow Herbs – Gardening and … – Today I have decided to write about some of the easiest to grow plants in our garden. They are Chives, Ku Chai (Garlic Chives), and Sweet Basil. The two forms of chives are great chopped up finely in a salad. …
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How To easily Grow Herbs | Gardening In Our Backyard Garden – How To easily Grow Herbs. 09 Feb. Posted by Webmann as gardening · Growing herbs can be an easy process and the results can be used to add flavor to meals, make soothing and relaxing teas or for making fragrant sachets, potpourri, …
Home Kitchen Garden Beekeepers
When a beehive gets crowded, the queen departs with several tens of thousands of workers. We spotted this swarm clumped on the trunk of a young spruce tree and installed it into one of our working hives.
In a recent guest post on the Northwest Garden Show blog, I suggested that if you have a Home Kitchen Garden, perhaps you should take up beekeeping. With our honeybee population beleaguered by Colony Collapse Disorder, foul brood, wax moths, and mites, every gardener should be concerned.
Please at least employ gardening practices that encourage pollinators and that protect them from harm. This means eliminating chemicals from your gardening activity, or learning to apply them so they present the least possible danger to pollinators. It means growing a variety of plants that produce flowers in all seasons. It means going easy on weeds that provide pollen and nectar to bees. It means letting your herbs and vegetables flower even when you’re done with them. It means providing places in your garden that provide shelter from wind and rain. And it means leaving dead spent vegetable plants to die, dry, and winter over in your garden. (I’ll expand on these suggestions in a later post.)
Best of all, Become a Beekeeper
That’s my dad to your left, and me to your right. Yes, those are 1970s-era bell-bottom denim pants. It’s a pain to stuff bell bottoms into your socks. The white box to my dad’s right is a bee hive, probably newly-started with mail-order bees only a few weeks earlier.
Becoming a beekeeper is the most outrageous suggestion I made in that guest post. Honestly, it’s not all that outrageous a suggestion. Preparing for a honeybee colony requires a bit of do-it-yourself savvy, but an active bee hive requires far less attention than a housedog. And, while your bees won’t be nearly as cuddly as a dog, learning about how bees behave and getting to know their idiosyncrasies is both entertaining and satisfying. What’s more, with surprisingly little effort, even one bee hive can return many quarts of honey in a season.
Been There, Done That
When I was in my teens, my brother convinced my dad it would be a good idea to raise bees—though I think we called it raising honey. Being mildly allergic to bee stings, I wasn’t thrilled about the idea, and I was kind of detached as my dad received beekeeping equipment via mail-order (close to 20 years before the Internet happened), and assembled bee hives in our living room.
When I learned that bees would arrive in the mail, and somehow end up in the boxes my dad built, I started to take notice. Once his beekeeping operation was in full-swing, I was hooked: those critters were fascinating. I enjoyed working the bees, and I enjoyed reading about bee culture.
We Captured a Honeybee Swarm
In coming months we’ll explore the honey-raising experience. I’ll share some memories, and we’ll look at modern beekeeping methods. Right now I want to tell you about capturing a swarm. The story touches on several details of bee culture that we’ll explore in-depth in upcoming posts.
Once the queen bee finds her way into the bees’ new home, some worker bees face the entrance and jut their rear ends into the air. The swarm flows like liquid into the hive’s entrance. The entrance here is in the middle of the bees, and you see some order in the bees’ alignment.
Bees swarm when their hive gets crowded: they manufacture some new queen bees, and the existing queen leaves the hive along with a whole bunch of worker bees. Oddly, it seems the bees leave the hive before they’ve decided where to go.
This swarm lands somewhere—often not far from the original hive—while various scouts search for a new home. The attentive beekeeper can capture the resting swarm and install it in an empty hive box. Amazingly, you can also install a swarm into a hive that already holds an active colony; the bees will get along (don’t just dump a swarm into an active hive; there are steps to take to ensure a hive’s workers accepts the new bees); the photos in this post are of a swarm that we added to an established hive.
Early in our beekeeping days, we found a swarm on the trunk of a small tree near our hive boxes. Capturing the swarm was simple: we cut the tree off near the ground (we had to run the saw through the ball of bees, but they obligingly moved out of the way), shook the bees off onto the top of an open hive box, and watched the bees move into the box. It was that easy… and watching them was very cool; I saw this phenomenon many times during our beekeeping years. It goes like this:
For a few minutes, there’s a blob of bees writhing around on—or in front of—the hive box. (Sometimes we’d stretch a bed sheet in front of the hive and dump the bees on the sheet. The bees found their ways into the front of the hive box.) Naturally, some bees wander into the box. Scan the swarm carefully and you might spot the queen bee; her attendants will eventually usher her inside.
Bees who know where the queen is, stand in place pointing in her direction. Other bees fall into line also pointing toward the queen. (To point, the bees face the Queen and extend their butts upward.) Soon, the bulk of the swarm is streaming into the hive past several dozen or hundred pointing bees. Finally, even the pointer bees head into the hive.
Seeing a swarm communicate so rapidly and effectively gave me a lot of respect for them. These and other bee behaviors were truly awe-inspiring, and I never got tired of seeing bees in action.
I’ll continue to encourage you to raise bees, and I’m looking forward to the day when I establish hives in my own home kitchen garden. I hope you’ll come back here to share your experiences as you get started with your own hives.
Home Kitchen Garden Chickens
Home Kitchen Garden Chickens
I’m starting to succumb to the backyard chicken movement. Do you have chickens in your garden? I may soon.
When I started blogging about your home kitchen garden, it hadn’t occurred to me that there would be an enthusiastic gardening community well-established on-line. Moreover, chickens were not in my thinking.
Chickens? As I’ve become familiar with on-line gardening resources, I’ve “met” gardeners of nearly every stripe. Some garden primarily to produce food. Others garden to surround themselves with flowers and ornamental plants. I’ve met people whose gardens are metaphors for their lives, some who relate to gardening spiritually, and others who dig in their gardens simply to escape the grind of corporate jobs or the occasional chaff of family life. I’ve also met gardeners who raise chickens.
Chickens in a Home Kitchen Garden
One of my new chicken-loving friends, Robin Wedewer, writes Bumblebee Blog and contributes to www.examiner.com where she recently published an article presenting the benefits of raising chickens. Please check it out; it may start you down a new garden path.
I actually got introduced to the backyard chicken movement a few years ago when a poker buddy built a moveable chicken coop and started several birds in his garage. The coop’s design let him move it into the yard where chicken droppings would fall directly onto the lawn. After several days, he could move the coop and fertilize a different patch of grass. Of course, when I met the chickens, I figured my friend had blown a gasket and I got on with my life.
The on-line garden chicken community is changing my thinking. Because of their enthusiasm, I recently visited with hundreds of chickens at the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg. There, I came to appreciate the charm of these useful animals. They aren’t as cuddly as dogs, but they certainly develop attachments and genuinely seem to enjoy interactions with their human caretakers. Oh, and they lay eggs you can eat.
Your Garden Chickens
There are many sources of information about backyard chickens. Of course, check out Robin’s articles, and when you decide to set up your own garden chicken operation, go here: Chicken Coop Plan.
In the meantime, I’ve prepared a video in appreciation of all of my on-line chicken gardening enthusiasts. It’s a collection of intimate portraits of chickens at the Pennsylvania Farm Show. It runs just under three and a half minutes, and I call it Sixty Chickens:
If you get a chance, check out the site Life in the Lost World for some terrific chicken-related humor and further discussion about backyard chickens. Here are a few other articles to help inform you about backyard chickens:
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Backyard Chickens Part 2: Housing | Urban Homestead – What kind of coop should you have for your chickens? Let’s take a look at your options.
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Backyard Chickens – Five Reasons You MUST Try Them, and Two … – Esther the Chicken. 1. They make charming pets! I love their happy little chortles when they see us, and if you want them to love you forever, a bit of leftover rice or lettuce goes down a treat. They’re great gardening companions, too. …
Gifts for a Large-Scale Home Kitchen Garden
Having trouble deciding what to get for a home kitchen gardener in your life? Here are a few ideas to help you along. I selected these items with people in mind who manage large-scale kitchen gardens, though some are appropriate also for people who buy produce in bulk and preserve it for later use.
If you know someone who has committed a big chunk of yard space to vegetable gardening, or whose ornamental trees are actually an orchard, or who shops at farmers’ markets and buys fruit by the bushel, you’ll find something here to please them. I’ve selected items from Amazon.com that have only the highest customer reviews.
Reduce a Home Kitchen Gardener’s Back Trouble
In a traditional farm-style home kitchen garden, a farmer uses a tractor or a horse to drag a plow through the garden plot and prepare it for planting. But some gardeners turn soil by hand. For a large garden patch, the prospect of hand-turning so much soil might end a project… and it might dissuade an avid gardener from expanding a garden; a sad outcome, indeed. Help protect your gardener’s health by giving a gas-driven auto tiller. These bad boys can cut new planting beds into a lawn, can turn over a bed’s soil—and mix in compost, and can rip out weeds during the growing season. This one is highly-rated by Amazon.com customers.
A Home Kitchen Garden Garden Cart
When you tend a large home kitchen garden, you move a lot of stuff around: you move tools from storage to the garden and back, you move plant seedlings from your car or your sprouting room to your garden, you move weeds away from the garden, you move compost and fertilizer to the garden, and you move produce from the garden to your house. You might also move cold frames, fencing, row covers, and trellises about through the season. A good garden cart is essential, and this one fits the bill. My parents had a similar garden cart, and it handled every job we gave it—including hauling manure from the barn and firewood from the forest. Short of a lawn tractor with a pull-behind cart, there’s nothing better for hauling stuff around your yard and garden.
A Canner for Fruits and Pickles from a Home Kitchen Garden
All kitchen gardeners are potential canners (unless they’re already canners). People who grow fruit trees are especially likely to take up canning; when a tree produces more fruit than you can eat in season, it’s very hard to watch it go to waste; canning preserves it for use till the next year’s harvest. Most people don’t can their own food because they haven’t tried. Once they see how easy it is, they’re usually hooked. Get the gardener in your life started with this highly-rated canning pot (and the starter kit below) for boiling water bath canning. (A boiling water bath can preserve fruits—including tomatoes—and pickles, but is not appropriate for canning vegetables.)
Accessories for Home Canning
It’s possible to take up home canning with utensils most people already have in their kitchens. However, canning suppliers have developed several tools that make the whole canning process easier. This accessory kit includes a canning funnel, a magnetic lid lifter, a bottle lifter, and a small canning rack that might fit in a stock pot your gardening acquaintance already owns. It’s a very popular set and makes a great compliment to the canning pot described above—or to the pressure canner described below.
A Pressure Canner for Vegetables from a Home Kitchen Garden
When a garden overproduces vegetables, you can freeze them, can them, dehydrate them, give them away, or toss them in the compost barrel. Canning is a very satisfying solution, but it requires equipment most kitchens lack: a pressure canner. A pressure canner heats canning jars to a very high temperature, killing any bacteria that might be in the food being canned. A pressure canner can preserve meats and prepared dishes such as soups and stews, and it can double as a pressure cooker: a stovetop cook pot that can cook foods more rapidly than a microwave oven and with better results.
A Home Kitchen Garden Dehydrator
You don’t need to have a home kitchen garden to enjoy a food dehydrator. A gardener might use one to preserve home grown vegetables and fruit. But anyone can use a dehydrator to make fruit rollups and meat jerky. When you consider the cost of commercially-available dried apricots, dried apples, and dried tomatoes, a food dehydrator can pay for itself in one or two uses. The Nesco Gardenmaster is one of the highest-rated dehydrators available, and will preserve fruits, vegetables, and meats for many years.
A Dehydrator for a Modest Budget
If you’re excited about giving your gardening acquaintance a dehydrator, but you have a limited budget, give the Nesco FD-75PR. This is one of the most popular items sold in Amazon.com’s Kitchen and Dining category… and in their Home & Garden category! A terrific product at a great price.
A Home Kitchen Garden Rain Barrel
If you want to attract a bunch of gardeners to a seminar, promise to send each of them home with a free rain barrel.
Every home kitchen garden with room enough should have a rain barrel. Minimally, a rain barrel catches water as it falls from the sky. More typically, a rain barrel sits under a downspout from your house’s rain gutter system, and runoff from your house fills the barrel.
For seven or so years, I’ve figured to build a large water tank against the side of my house. Of course, each year has passed with no cistern, and every time I’ve run the hose to water the garden I’ve cursed my own sloth. How much water could I save if I collect the runoff from my house?
Happily, I got the answer to that question and more just a few weeks ago when I attended a seminar presented by the local Cooperative Extension office. Newspaper advertisements alerted me to this seminar and promised a take-home rain barrel to the first 25 people to register. The free seminar alone would have been two well-spent hours.
Home Kitchen Garden Bonanza
If you’re new to gardening, or you’re struggling with unsolvable problems, or you simply want some fresh perspectives, find a Cooperative Extension office in your neighborhood. These state-run offices are very much about agriculture… as is a home kitchen garden. Cooperative Extension offices may offer information about lawn care; pest control; vegetable, fruit, nut, flower, and decorative gardening; house plants; and composting. Cooperative Extension offices may sell (or give away) soil-testing services to help solve your growing problems. They may offer free individual consultations. They may offer seminars about useful gardening topics. They may even offer speakers willing to present at your garden club events. Chances are, you can sign up with Cooperative Extension to become a certified master gardener.
Don’t overlook this resource. Every owner of a home kitchen garden can get something useful from Cooperative Extension. Here’s a link to help you locate a Cooperative Extension office in your area.
The Rain Barrel Seminar
I heard some cool stuff at the seminar… but only captured some of it.
- Of all the water from Pennsylvania that flows into the Chesapeake Bay, 93% of it comes from the Susquehanna river (which runs through Lewisburg, PA where I live).
- The Susquehanna River delivers 50% of the fresh water that flows into the Chesapeake Bay.
- If a sewage-treatment plant can’t handle the volume of sewage running into the plant, the overflow goes directly into our waterways (a situation that arises during heavy rains—especially where people’s downspouts feed into the sewers).
- One inch of rain falling on a 1,000 square foot house equals about 600 gallons of water.
- 40% of the water that people use through the spring, summer, and fall goes into such outdoor applications as washing cars and watering lawns and gardens.
There were many other fascinating statistics, but the ones I’ve mentioned paint the picture so clearly: You can save a lot of money and help preserve your area waterways by installing a rain barrel and using the water it collects to maintain your home kitchen garden.
A downspout adapter sits on top of the rain barrel (left). The overflow port on the side of the barrel (right) accepts a standard garden hose to redirect runoff away from your house. Any of my downspouts would deliver a higher inflow than this overflow port could handle; I’ll need to modify the rain barrel when I install it.
The Attendance Bonus
The typical rain barrel has a few limitations. For example, a barrel might hold 60 to 100 gallons. This means one inch of rain falling on a 1,000 square foot roof will produce at least five times more water than a barrel can hold. The typical rain barrel allows for this by including an overflow port near the top of the barrel. If you have space, you can run the overflow into a second rain barrel, and from there to a third, and so on. If you don’t want to manage so many barrels, you run the overflow out to your garden, or well away from your house, or back into the downspout that you redirected into the rain barrel in the first place.
A faucet mounted near the bottom of the rain barrel accepts a standard garden hose. To provide adequate pressure for typical gardening applications, I’ll need to place the barrel on a stand several feet above the ground. Once it’s elevated, I’ll also want to strap it to the side of my house so it doesn’t fall over at an inopportune moment.
The seminar explained how to install a rain barrel, and the presenters assembled a rain barrel so we could see how to make our own. Amazingly, despite having about 90 attendees, the Cooperative Extension speakers had made enough rain barrels for each of us to take one home. A small grant had paid for the materials, and for the Extension-workers’ time.
In future posts, I’ll show how I install my rain barrel (won’t happen until spring), and I’ll explain how you can make your own. If you don’t want to build your own, jump out to the Home Kitchen Garden Store, and order one now so you can reduce your water bills and grow a greener garden in the spring. By all means, get a water barrel and install it.
Here are more articles about rain barrels. Please enjoy:
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Use a Rain Barrel for Easy Greywater Diversion Systems « People … – Oh and…remember if you live up north, your rain barrel parts could freeze (just like hoses) in winter so that is something to consider when designing your greywater system. Southern climates…well lucky you! …
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Rainy Review of Rain Barrels at Jackie Koerner – You can also build your own rain barrel with instructions from the Maryland Environmental Design Program’s website. Some municipalities sell rain barrels at a discount to assist with the reduction of rain water runoff. …
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Time to Winterize Your Rain Barrel – Move your rain barrel into a garage or storage shed if you have one. If you do not have the storage space, turn the barrel upside down to prevent water from entering. Cover the spigot opening to prevent water from collecting there as …
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Head Spring Farm Blogs » Blog Archive » Reclaimed Whiskey Rain … – The rain barrel concept has been around for a very long time and I recall we had a cistern at the farm house where I grew up. Rain water stored in a barrel or cistern is not quite ready for drinking water unless treated, …
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Back Porch Rain Barrel – This summer we finally constructed a rain barrel. We’ve had a 55-gallon drum sitting in our yard for several years. We finally made the commitment to convert it into a rain collection barrel. It was so simple, I wish we would have done …
Next Spring’s Home Kitchen Garden
In various seasons, I’ve gathered peas, beans, tomato seeds, dill seeds, and corriander to plant in the succeeding season. This can be a mistake: Often, a commercial variety of vegetable produces seeds whose resulting plants are nothing like the originals… and usually not nearly as appealing.
In my last post, I shared some videos of a home kitchen gardener who used a six foot space along the windows in her sun room to grow salad greens and herbs during the winter. If you’re in a temperate hardiness zone 8, 7, 6, 5, or 4 and you have a sun room to spare, you can have at least a modest kitchen garden all year.
But if you have garden space in your yard, don’t squander all your indoor growing space to produce off-season salad greens. Do some planning now, order up some unusual seeds, and jumpstart next spring’s home kitchen garden inside.
Seeds and Flats
If you’re a novice gardener, your life will be easiest if you take the obvious path: shop locally for seeds and flats (sets of young plants started for you at a nursery) as they become available in the spring. Why flats? Once reason: some seeds are a bit finicky and a nursery might have more luck starting them than you will… by the time they’re on sale in flats, you know they’ve sprout and are healthy.
But there’s another reason that may be more compelling: starting seeds indoors and transplanting them to your home kitchen garden in the spring stretches out your growing season. Plant lettuce seeds in late March, and you may be eating lettuce by early May. But if you plant baby lettuce plants in March, you could have a robust lettuce garden in April.
If you plan to grow cillantro, buy enough seeds to plant every three or four weeks through the season. Unless you’re addicted, only a half dozen plants will supply plenty of seasoning. Seeds you plant in the spring can mature and re-seed themselves by mid-season, and plants that haven’t gone to seed might winter over, depending on how low the temperature goes.
There are plants that might require more than a hundred days to produce their first fruits, but would continue fruiting for another hundred if given the opportunity. At the same time, some plants mature very quickly, and if given a head start they can feed you well and then get out of the way for a second, and even a third planting.
Variety in a Home Kitchen Garden
So, if you buy locally and plant according to directions on the seed packets and the information tabs sticking in the soil of your flats, you should do fine. In fact, if you follow this path for all your years of gardening, you’ll enjoy a lot of great fresh produce with little hassle.
Here’s the rub: most gardening stores and nurseries have somewhat limited offerings. At my local garden store, for example, I find several beefsteak varieties of tomatoes, an Italian plum tomato, a few early varieties, and two or three off-color varieties. When I tour gardening-related web sites, I see dozens of varieties of tomatoes I’d never have guessed existed.
You can do this too. Get your hands on a seed catalogue or two or three and visit some on-line seed suppliers. It’s amazing how desperate you can become to grow something different from the local offerings.
If you’re going to diversify your home kitchen garden, you will quite likely need to start seeds indoors before the growing season begins. The three videos I’ve included with this post provide encouragement and insights that can help you develop a plant nursery in your home. In most cases, you start seeds from three to six weeks before you’ll be able to plant them outside. So, if you live in zones 5 and 6, you need to be ready to plant indoors by late February and into March. You may not be able to order seeds yet—or you might not see them until later if you do order—but if you need to move furniture and build shelves before you can plant indoors, get a little head start in the cold winter months.
Please enjoy the videos:
Your In-Home Kitchen Garden
Oregano peeks out from under the first significant snow of autumn. When growing things outdoors is no longer an option, it can be very satisfying to plant an in-home kitchen garden.
Snow fell heavy on my home kitchen garden last night. This morning, every vaguely horizontal surface held an inch or more of light powder. I’m glad I’d already put my garden to bed, and that I’d finished a few related projects. Just last weekend, I planted two pear trees, a sour cherry tree, and two pecan trees and documented step-by-step how to plant trees in a blog post titled New Pear Trees in my Small Kitchen Garden. Now I’m kind of depressed.
Depressed? That might be overstating things. But the passing of fresh produce season is a bummer. Sure, I’ll still be able to buy stuff flown in from Peru, California, and other warmer regions, but none will compare to the produce that grows during spring, summer, and early autumn within a few miles of my house in Central Pennsylvania.
What’s a Home Kitchen Gardener to do?
So, I’m turning my attention inside. Depending on your determination and on the space you have available, you too can get gardening inside this winter. To provide encouragement, I’ve dug up some videos that show how one gardening enthusiast used her sun room in the off season to keep the produce going. I’ve included the first two in a series of five videos she produced on the project.
Please appreciate that this woman is very ambitious with her gardening. You don’t need to commit an entire room to your own in-home kitchen garden. What’s more, fancy storage containers, label makers, and other dedicated indoor gardening supplies aren’t necessary to succeed with winter produce.
On the other hand, for most of us, it’s impossible to over-emphasize two fundamental challenges of growing produce while the snow alls:
1. Winter sunlight may not be enough to feed vegetable and fruit plants
2. Many vegetables and fruits grow best in relatively hot weather
Lighting an in-Home Kitchen Garden
Will you need supplemental lighting to grow vegetables in the winter? Even if you have south-facing windows (for those in the northern hemisphere), your vegetable plants may not draw enough energy from the winter sun to plump up tomatoes, peas, beans, or whatever other items you grow. Generally, garden plants thrive when they get six hours of full sunlight each day.
South-facing windows in my basement have an extra-wide sill which is perfect for flower pots. However, the basement is cool, and winter sun isn’t bright enough for plants to produce lots of sugar and starch; I couldn’t grow beans and tomatoes here without supplemental lighting and heat.
Winter sunlight is weaker than summer sunlight. Only plants centered in unobstructed south-facing windows will get the dose they crave. If you add full-spectrum fluorescent lighting, and turn it on from mid-morning to late afternoon, you’ll have much better results than if you rely solely on natural sunlight.
Heat an in-Home Kitchen Garden
Plant biology slows down as the temperature drops. Some plants simply won’t sprout if the soil isn’t warm enough, and having sprouted, they grow very slowly unless the air is warm. Plants growing indoors in the winter may face two temperature challenges: First, we’ve all become very conservation-oriented, so we keep our living spaces in the sixties (Fahrenheit). Second, when we set up a home kitchen garden in front of windows, we expose them to the least cold-proof places in our homes; it might be ten to twenty degrees colder near a window than it is three or four feet away from the window.
You Know the Challenges…
To succeed with an indoor produce garden, provide adequate supplemental lighting and at least some localized heat near your plants. This may mean keeping a single room warmer than the rest of your home, or placing a space heater or several incandescent lights near your in-home kitchen garden.
The first video is three minutes, 20 seconds long. The second video is two minutes 41 seconds. Please enjoy them!
Here are links to other articles about growing vegetables indoors:
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Fun with Children and Indoor Container Gardening (Container … – Great ideas for container gardening • Growing an avocado tree from seed (C. DE MAIRE) • Inverted indoor gardening (OhCripes) • Japanese Maples for Containers (Dave’s Garden) • Starting a DIY Vertical Garden (Google / Gardening Tips ‘n’ …
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Indoor Gardening Tools – Enjoy Your Gardening Experience With The … – Abhishek Agarwal asked: The purpose of this article is to assess the need for various indoor gardening tools. Tools for indoor gardening are intended for.
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How to Grow a Garden » Blog Archive » Vegetable Gardening – To … – Providing adequate sunshine to your indoor vegetable garden without scorching the plants can be problematic, particularly if the windows in your home are not southerly facing. If you are fortunate to have south-facing windows but cannot …
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Hone your Green Thumb with Indoor Vegetable Gardening – You also don’t have the problem with garden pests with your indoor vegetable garden, since you are able to control the environment of your plants much more effectively. Finally, an indoor vegetable garden can dress up a south-facing …
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Indoor Container Vegetable Gardening Ideas | Cool Gardening Ideas – Indoor container vegetable gardening might not be quite the same as growing the same plants outdoors, but it can be fun to tend an indoor vegetable garden when the snows are blowing and the winds are roaring outdoors! …
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Grow Lights to Co2 Grow Rooms made Simple! » Imagine Creating Your … – There is a way around this and it’s just a perfect idea for the health conscious person… an indoor vegetable garden will satisfy that desire for pure, clean, unadulterated, fresh tasting salad or steamed veggies. …
Help for New Home Kitchen Gardens
While it can seem challenging to create a home kitchen garden, the basic principles of gardening are very simple. Consider: whole prairies, forests, and jungles, manage to maintain themselves without human intervention. They follow a natural cycle:
- Seeds fall on soil
- Moisture triggers germination
- Plants grow and produce fruit/seeds
- Seeds disperse and some fall on soil
- Plants die, eventually decomposing into soil
The challenge in growing a home kitchen garden is that you’re often trying to get plants to grow in soil or climate that doesn’t appeal to them… or that gives plant-eating insects and other pests an overwhelming advantage.
The Successful Home Kitchen Gardener
The simple secret for success with a home kitchen garden is in a single word: knowledge. The more you know about gardening, the more, better produce you can coax out of any garden. Fortunately, with almost no gardening knowledge or experience, a first-time grower can be satisfyingly successful. But any newcomer to gardening wanting to improve their results should embark on an adventure of discovery: find opportunities to learn, and take the knowledge with you into your garden.
Here are some suggestions for where to get started:
Get a mentor—I can’t emphasize this enough. Hang out in a home kitchen garden with someone who’s maintained one for ten or so years, and you’ll become savvy very quickly.
Contact your local Cooperative Extension office—Sounds a little stiff, but these folks live to promote agriculture and gardening (among other things). Many extension offices offer free seminars on planting, composting, and more. There’s a clickable map at their web site to help you find local extension offices and programs.
Read some good books—This is a very low-impact way to become an expert. There are hundreds of books about gardening, some even entertaining to read. Ideally, find books that are written specifically about the region where you’re growing a home kitchen garden. This book store offers many regionally-focused titles.
Peruse at least one seed/nursery catalog—These provide massive inspiration: I always want to expand my garden when I read catalogs. Also, most catalogs are goldmines of information about plants, planting, plant care, crop yields… nearly everything you need to be successful. If you don’t have a printed catalog, check out the Johnny’s Seeds catalog on line.
Follow some gardening blogs—With many blogs and gardening web sites from which to choose, you’ll find some whose approaches and instruction perfectly suit your sensibilities. When you find a blog you like, participate! Leave encouraging comments, ask questions, and buy stuff from advertisements on the pages; a gardener who’s blogging about it will be thrilled to help solve your gardening challenges. I’ve listed a few compelling sites you can explore in the box, Home Kitchen Garden Sites… and if you haven’t yet, hop over to this blog’s sister: Your Small Kitchen Garden.
Participate in gardening forums—Gardening forums abound on the internet, and some specifically focus on kitchen gardening. I’ve joined more than I’ve been able to keep up with, but there’s good information on all of them. Floating a question on a gardening forum quickly teaches you that there are no uniquely correct answers. Answering a question on such a forum can draw ire and admiration. In any case, you’ll learn. The box titled Home Kitchen Garden Forums lists several that I’ve joined. I’m most active in Yahoo’s Veggie Patch. Beware, I’ve seen unfathomably rude behavior on some forums.