Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Had a request for carrot-raisin salad, so remembered carrots are still out there in the garden and went rummaging... the big guy is about 3" in diameter and made a fine salad-for-two.

So how do you keep gophers from eating all your root vegies?

Those look great.

Don't think we have any gophers. Moles, mice, & kangaroo rats leave the carrots alone. Slugs and a few other minor pests take small bites.

They're here ...




It's the one all year when I'm not particularly frugal. I always order too many seeds.

Yup, got my catalogs, too! I don't think I'll be getting anything new this year. Mainly need to refine the amounts now that I've gotten results for this locale. Oh, wait, I may try a potato tower using an indeterminate/late potato variety.

Started a beef stew today... no, that doesn't sound like gardening, however it involves garden produce. So:
1) Potatoes fetched from the garage. They're storing well and the supply is adequate.
2) Carrots. Had some in the fridge, but needed more from the garden. Oops, should have thought ahead because it's 26F outside this morning and the top few inches of soil are frozen solid. Forking them up wasn't going to work! Classic garden spade plunged through the frost layer about a foot behind the row, then levering up managed to work without snapping the carrots. Overall, they're wintering over quite nicely in the garden, so it seems that is a reasonable storage option here.
3) Onions... well, they haven't stored very well and it is partly my fault. They needed more drying and/or more space between them during storage. Unfortunatley it is time to add them to the compost pile.

Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, IA has a program where they send you a collection of seeds (70+ packets), a book and information on starting a seed sharing program. They do this for people in clubs or those wanting to start a club.

It's all completely free.

Being co-presidents of your local garden club has it's perks. We are planning a seed swap in March and this is a great way to give it a boost. We get to keep the book as a 'fee'.

Sunny, dry January day... so instead of fishing, I decided it was time to dig into the garden work (literally!). A bit of weeding and a whole bunch of rock removal from the area I expanded into last year.

The rock removal is slow. This particular section is a slurry of sandy clay and rocks, probably from a landslide during a flood. The rocks are annoyingly large (up to bowling ball size) and kind of jammed tight. Last year I had only removed rocks in the rototiller layer, the first 6" maybe, so I could quickly plant corn. Now I'm going down to my usual depth, a bit over a shovel depth, so I won't be striking rocks with tools in the future.

I'm staring at big fluffy snowflakes falling from the sky. They've been falling since before dawn, instead of the forecast rain transition to snow this evening, because the surrounding hills trip up the clouds. Also trying to reconcile the snow with 'Gee, in 2-4 weeks I'll be planting peas & onions & beginning assorted greens & firing up the greenhouse'.

Looking ahead on the potato supply, it appears we have enough so I won't be ordering potato starts for this spring. The early red norlands have been sprouting, so they don't store quite as well as the gold yukons. This only really matters if you're trying to stretch storage of the reds... next fall I'll freeze some before they sprout and possibly switch to a different red variety in future years. Planting time for potatoes is April-ish for me.

No snow at my place. I had my Toyota pickup in the garage expecting to have to drive it to work today, and instead spent time scraping ice off my car's windshield. Weird. I'm going up to Chehalis, WA for work later this afternoon. They have about 7" of snow.

I've been planning this year's garden. We removed some bushes and the swing set so I have room to expand. I'm hoping to make a space for melons and more potatoes away from the main garden (I like to keep the plants I tend to pick daily near the house for convenience). My main focus will be expanding the herb garden. I want to include more medicinal herbs since our pharma needs around here are significant and not very ERE-like. When we lived in Philadelphia we had a large herb garden that people still talk about. I'd like to recreate that in Stepford.

Another goal is to tour more gardens from the 18th and 19th centuries for old school ideas on growing herbs and other heirloom plants. Here's a video tour of Williamsburg's garden. It's been years since I've been there so I might try to visit again. I'm hoping to visit several gardens like this over the spring and summer.

This thread, some journals, and some youtube videos have really gotten me in the mood to do some garden-related (mostly software) projects.

For now I don't have a garden of any sort at my SO's place in the Bay Area. We do have a compost pile going though and I look forward to the weekly dumping of the scrap bin to it and turning it over a little to check out all the critters. It started out hosting an ant bed, but after a while pillbugs and earthworms have taken over. I saw an albino pillbug today!

Since we don't have chickens or fish or anything.. I feel like it's slightly inefficient to let those little buggers to live out long lives only to die of old age (the compost bin is covered to prevent birds from feasting). So does anyone have any experience with eating these two species? I've been reading the how-tos online the last 30m or so..

I could have planted peas today, but will wait until tomorrow. The incoming rainstorm shouldn't hit us until afternoon, so I should have time. Forking the bed, removing more rocks & grass, and safekeeping the occasional found potato has taken 6 hours, split between yesterday and today.

This bed is 30 ft long and 4 ft wide. The grass strip between the bed and the greenhouse on the right is slated for conversion into garden bed this year.


These are the potatoes found in the bed yesterday. Another batch, just as large, was found today.


And here's one of my rockpiles, about half of which came from this bed.

First round of peas were planted. Three different varieties from seed leftover from 2016 & 2014 (oops!), occupying about 25 row feet. I filled out the row with spinach (old seed from 2016) because my planting calendar reminded me that spinach can go in now... checking germination rate with a few seeds between moist paper towels in the house.

And then, just because I've not tried it before, I planted potatoes in containers. They'll have to be brought in whenever it frosts. If all goes well, grows well, I should have a nice extra early crop in May. 4 went into the biggest pot, 3 into a plastic tub with rope handles, and then another 2 into a Styrofoam pot (probably should only have 1 potato). Wife mentioned that we have a few trees sitting in containers, so once we plant those I'll get to use them for potatoes, also!



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The weather last week:




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Bonus pictures of January 12 visiting elk:

Pretty place. I love elk.

Rain stopped. Thought it would taper into a light drizzle, but no, complete stop after accumulating 4+" in the last 36 hrs. River is still a little high and colored to go steelhead fishing right now, so back into the garden. Collected all the rocks weathered out of the recent diggings; looking good as most of it was gravel-sized.

Recently planted pea plantings were not eroded away or exposed, so that was good. Went over to the untended, unthinned carrot patch planted with old (very old!) seed and dug up 6 lbs of ugly edible carrots. There were only a few that went straight to the compost pile, including two that reverted to white with many branches (they weren't the native wild carrot because the diameter was massive). Makes me wonder what it would take to keep them from getting so ugly... maybe a little rain protection & frost/freeze protection?

Zone 2 garden update. I guess it's too early to plant anything, eh?


Hubby is making me grow lights from scratch. For legal stuff!

George the original one wrote:I filled out the row with spinach (old seed from 2016) because my planting calendar reminded me that spinach can go in now... checking germination rate with a few seeds between moist paper towels in the house.

The spinach seed in the house germinated very well, maybe 90% sprouted. So spinach seed life is very good when stored in the meat drawer of the fridge.

In other signs of spring, the blueberry bushes are budding out now. It will still be awhile until the leaves pop out.

It's going to frost tonight, probably do so for the rest of the week, so the potato planter tubs are moving into the garage.

DIY grow lights! The light is actually almost white, but the camera goes crazy in this spectrum.
Will start planting starters next week, when the potting soil thaws

An inch of snow fell this morning. Fortunately it melted off the garden by 1p, so I ventured out to plant the onion starts which arrived in the mail yesterday. Was driven back indoors by rain after planting half a row. Then 15 minutes later I the sun broke through and I finished planting everything...

I could swear I ordered bundles of 50 plants, but each bundle contained over 100 plants. Dang, extra planting. Yay, extra plants! Varieties: redwing & walla walla ordered through Johnny's, just like last year, only 1 bundle of each instead of 3.

The green onions (scallions) have sprouted indoors. Still debating how I'm going to handle this batch, whether to leave them in the pots when I transfer them to the greenhouse or to replant them. Or maybe "both" as an experiment.

Potatoes in the containers have been hiding in the garage this week because we keep getting snow showers. Expect to drag them back out into the rain on Tues. A couple of them have poked sprouts up out of the compost already, so I really don't want to kill those off.