Father's Day Challenge, Mission Accomplished!

It has been awhile since I've posted and the garden has made much progress in that time.  The main reason the posts have been scarce this year is between fixing the house up and chopping down ultra-fast growing weeds, my time has been a bit tight lately.  As you can see in the first picture, we will have fully red, 100% vine ripened tomatoes to eat on Father's Day this year.  That alone motivates one to take a few minutes and post an update.  Since we're on the subject of updates, in my usual rambling fashion, I'll try and catch everyone up on just how "farm like" the Farmville Reality Project is becoming!  First we'll cover the tomatoes.  The second picture shows how happy they are in their chosen spot.  In fact they are about as close to what can be called a tomato forest, if such a thing were to ever be invented.  Both of the plants that were planted under the plastic tunnel back in early March are about six feet tall and have so much foliage that I've been pruning them back.  They also have enough fruit set to yield us 40 to 50 pounds of tomatoes easily from the both of them.  One of them is an Early Girl, which is an indeterminate type, which means it will keep setting more fruit throughout the season as long as it is healthy.  The other one is a determinate type, which sets a heavy main crop and then slows down setting more fruit.  What's not in the picture are the two later planted ones next to them.  Those are setting quite a bit of fruit now and will start producing when these two slow down in a couple of months.  We also planted six paste types called San Marzano in a another spot by the old barn.  All in all, the tomatoes are growing amazingly well and thrive in abundant Arbuckle sunshine. 

The next picture up is the golden zucchini that much like winter squash, has the potential to feed the world's hungry masses.  Each plant yields a nice size squash each and every day, or two smaller ones if you prefer.  The name of the variety is Butter Stick and it has never let me down as a heavy producer.

The fourth picture is an eggplant plant.  I have to state it this way since I'm married to a teacher and she will hold me back a grade if I don't use proper grammar.  In the past, eggplant has been tough for me to raise.  The seedlings usually get beat up pretty bad by chewing insects that I've never quite figured out how to identify let alone annihilate.  I think planting a foot or so up off the ground in a pot has solved that problem and we will get plenty of eggplants this summer.

 The fifth picture is my version of a herb pot.  This one has rosemary, thyme, and dill in it.  Probably not the best choices as far as who likes to play nice together in the sandbox but the choices were driven by what sounded good with the many things I plan to cook the next few months.  The rosemary is the one that is out of place because it likes to be watered deep and then dry out before getting watered again.  The other two would not be on board with that plan but so far, the rosemary has cooperated and seems to be doing fine.

 The sixth picture is the classic summer herb, basil.  A couple of years ago, the main grunt worker (besides me of course) helped me process and freeze a whole bunch of pesto made with fresh basil and garlic from the garden at the other place.  Since she worked so hard in plucking and washing piles of basil leaves, I ended up giving her the lion's share of the finished product.  That left me severely under supplied that following winter.  What I did to address this issue was to marry my main grunt worker and now she will not only help process this season's basil into frozen pesto, but more importantly, she is now obligated to share the finished product with me!  That is the ultimate win-win.

The last picture is the parsley pot.  There is one curly leaf plant and one flat leaf plant.  Parsley is one of those herbs I would probably not buy at the market unless it was for some specific recipe but it's funny how when you have it on hand like this, you use it quite often.  Many dishes are "livened" up by just a small amount of chopped parsley sprinkled in right before serving.  It also is the base for an Argentinian sauce called Chimichurri that is very tasty on a big grilled steak.

This post is the first one I've made since Blogger.com updated their site and I for one am a happy camper.  The new format is much easier to use, especially when it comes to placing the pictures in the right place relative to the text.  Since it's so easy to use, maybe I'll even post more often and get some pictures of all the other things growing around Farmville! 

The Fathers' Day Tomato Challenge

The challenge referred to in the title is to have vine ripened tomatoes by Fathers' Day, which is usually the third Sunday in June. That wouldn't be too hard to do if you were growing them in Florida, Mexico, or even the desert southwest, but we're not. Here in our neck of the woods, a killing frost can happen in early April, so any frost sensitive plants (like tomatoes!) can't be transplanted until you're almost ready to file your tax returns. In some years, the weather is warm enough during May and June to make it possible to have a ripe tomato or two by Fathers' Day with plants started in mid April, but it's not likely. Those of us that want to have vine ripe tomatoes as early as possible need to get the plants in the ground in early March and provide an environment for the young plants to protect against the frost and also allow them to grow at a healthy pace even when the daytime high temperatures seldom climb out of the 50s some days. There are a few ways to accomplish this and the one method that has worked well for me over the years is to plant them in a plastic tunnel.

Many years ago, we grew and sold a few acres worth of vine ripened tomatoes at the farmers' market. They are a great item to sell there because people will make a special shopping trip to buy them. With all of the technical advances made in trying to get a nice vine ripened tomato to the supermarket shelf, it just hasn't happened yet. There is nothing like a tomato that has been allowed to turn completely red-ripe while hanging on the vine. Once you pick it, you better use it in the next day or two, so as you can see, people need to and will go out of their way to buy vine ripened tomatoes. One observation we made when we first started selling tomatoes was that people at the farmers' market fell into the habit (or pattern might be a better term) of buying the same items from the same vendors each week. It didn't take long to come to the conclusion that being able to sell folks the first of the season, vine ripe tomatoes, would "lock-in" a customer base for the rest of the season. That prompted some research and what I found out back then was there was a system for early planting that could result in having tomatoes a few weeks earlier than having to wait until the frost danger had passed. It utilized black plastic to cover the bed the tomatoes were planted on, and then a clear plastic was put over the top to create a mini greenhouse to both protect against frost and provide warmth for early growth. The clear plastic was supported by heavy wire hoops, so the tunnel it formed was about a foot and a half over the plants. This gave them enough room to grow and not push up against the plastic until late April when the tunnels would be removed. By that time, the tomato plants would be almost two feet tall and be just about ready to start setting fruit. Compared to a field transplanted after the frost danger was over, these early tunneled ones were way far ahead.

Since all of the materials we used to use for this system were intended for commercial farms, it doesn't make sense to buy them. There would literally be enough plastic to last us more years than we will be able to tend a garden. In looking around at what would make good substitutes, we had all we needed already on hand. For the black plastic to cover the bed (and help keep the young root systems warm), we used a black plastic trash bag. Just use scissors and cut the side and bottom seams, and presto, you have a single sheet of black plastic to stretch out and cover the planting bed. As you can see in the picture of the bed, it's important to shape it so the sides are well defined. This lets you pull the plastic tight across the top to make sure the plastic contacts the soil underneath it for maximum root warming.

The next step is to plant the tomato plants and put something over them to support the clear plastic tunnel. If you look closely at the next picture, you see I have used fencing wire for the tunnel supports. Any type of heavy wire will work. It needs to be heavy enough so that a length around 80 inches can form a strong enough hoop to hold the clear plastic up over the plants. If the wire is too thin, the wind might push it around enough to collapse the tunnel. Once the wire is cut to about 80 inches, put it over the planted bed and stick each end of the wire in the ground at least 8 inches. This anchors it very firmly. The two plants you see in the picture are a Celebrity and an Early Girl. Both are very tasty when picked vine ripe! Also remember to cut the hole in the black plastic big enough so it won't touch the stem of the plants. I made the planting holes around 3 inches in diameter.

In the third picture, you can see the final assembled tunnel. The clear plastic we used here is just plain old 1 mil thick painters plastic. You can buy a small roll for a couple bucks at any big box hardware store. The clear plastic is stretched over the wire and its edges are buried with soil on one side. You can bury both sides if you want but I used bricks to hold down one side so I can lift the plastic up and put some other plants in the tunnel to make use of its warmth. There are some squash and basil seeds in Dixie cups in the tunnel right now. I figure by the time they have outgrown the Dixie cups, it will be warm enough to plant them somewhere else in the garden. The little rows of slits about a third of the way up the side of the tunnel are for ventilation. Believe it or not, when the sun shines on this set up, it gets hot in there to the point if could fry the young plants. With a few slits cut in with a razor, it allows enough heat to exit but still keep things nice and toasty under the tunnel.

As a matter of fact, this picture shows just how nice and toasty it gets in there. This thermometer is in Celsius, so I will give you the Fahrenheit value. It's about 100 degrees in the tunnel this afternoon. If you want to do the conversion yourself, it goes like this: 38 x 9=
342. Divide that by 5 and you have 68.4. Now add 32 to it and the Fahrenheit value is 100.4! That's a pretty good solar gain since the outside temperature was in the high 60s. And remember, this set up can be done with materials most people already have on hand. It's a great way to get a jump on the season and have good old fashioned tomatoes in time for a Fathers' Day BBQ!

2012 Good Luck, Farmville Style

With the New Year, a great deal of attention is paid to having good luck in the upcoming year. I believe just about everyone wishes good luck to others in a very sincere manner, especially at the ringing in of a brand new year. To do this, we not only wish our friends and family a hearty "Happy New Year" in many different forms (mine was done via texting for the most part this year) but we also observe various cultural rituals as well. To welcome in 2012 in the Farmville Reality Project, we cooked black-eyed peas the night before. Some believe having blackeyed peas to ring in the New Year will bring good luck. Coupled with some pretty fancy cornbread, complete with cream corn in the batter, it was a very robust meal. As a matter of fact, meals like this just make you feel like you need to do some serious manual labor. So, on New Years Day-2012, manual labor was very much on the agenda. It also helped to do some pretty physical work on this day to chase away the blues that comes from having to say good bye to my wife for the next three weeks. We're both hoping these three weeks go by quickly... OK, back to the blog post...

With the great sunny weather on this New Year's day, it only made sense to get some badly needed yard work done. Not that sunny weather is rare here in Northern California in January, but it does seem to only happen on the days I'm stuck in the office. Once the weekend hits, it always changes, or so it it seems. The yard work needing to be done today was to clear and burn the brush from giving our cypress tree a long overdue haircut. As you can see from the first picture, it was beyond overgrown. I know the picture is from Google street view, and not very flattering. The truth is, I searched for a picture with this tree in it and could not find one. It was so ugly that we always made sure it was not in any part of the pictures we took last year before starting on the renovation work. That's pretty bad because we did take some very unattractive pictures to have as a point of comparison for when we finished some of our projects. This tree was beyond unattractive though, so I had to resort to stealing a shot of it from Google street view so you can see what a big difference there is from trimming away the many years of undergrowth. With all of those lower branches removed, you can actually see the whole front of the house from the street now. It's such a nice, stately looking house, it was a shame to have over half of it hidden behind ugly vegetation. The second picture shows how nice the yard looks from the street now.

The downside to doing this much pruning is the leftover branches and other debris. The Farmville work crew (including Roxy, the border collie, who has a story of her own about this tree and its underbrush) spent most of the day on New Year's Eve cutting down and dragging superhuman sized branches over to the orchard, into piles. When I went out there this morning and looked over what we had accomplished the day before, it became pretty apparent I better start burning these branches while the weather was nice. So that is what I did today on New Year's Day, 2012. I didn't want to attract the attention of the local fire chief, so I built a small burn pile and fed it a few branches at a time so the flames never got too crazy. And yes, I did make sure to have a water hose close by just in case things got out of hand. We always employ good safety practices here, well, for the most part we do. It was during this phase of the work day that I had ample time to think and come up with my goofy logic about stuff. That's what inspired this post. All that thinking had to result in something!


OK kids, follow closely because this might seem like a bit of a stretch. After you hear the logic behind it though, you will understand and hopefully get busy "creating" your own good luck in future years. Pay close attention because like most things I try to explain, it can sometimes be a little complicated. Eating a robust meal of blackeyed peas on New Years Eve provided the necessary energy to get out in the yard and work hard. During this hard work of clearing branches from around the cypress tree, I discovered the ground was covered in a few inches of decomposed cypress needles from all the years of these branches drying out and shedding as the newer branches grew over them. In earlier discussions on what to plant around the yard, the topic of blueberries had come up. As a matter of fact, we had pretty much decided on trying out a hedge-row of blueberries across the front of the yard since it faces north. The north side of the front yard gets the morning sun but is shaded from the intense afternoon sun during the summer months. As I looked at the piles of cypress needles, a light bulb clicked on. Cypress needles, much like the needles from any member of the pine family, are very acidic when composted into mulch. It just so happens that blueberries are acid loving plants and they recommend adding pine needle mulches to blueberry plantings to help get the soil to the pH that blueberries prefer. Even a slow learner like me saw the opportunity in this situation. The plan is to start composting these cypress needles shortly so that later this spring, we can work them into the beds the blueberries will be planted on. Some of the blueberries will be planted in the area the cypress had hogged with all of its underbrush, so that soil is probably already perfect for them. I know everyone is is still wondering what all this has to do with good luck and I started to explain but had to take a little detour to explain blueberry cultural practices. Believe me when I say that it was necessary for context. The good luck part goes like this. The blackeyed peas provided the much needed energy to clean up the cypress prunings. During that endeavor, the jackpot of mulch was discovered and dedicated to the future blueberry plantings. Everyone knows blueberries are one of the super-foods and eating them daily will help you live to be at least a hundred years old. If I get to be a hundred years old, that will certainly be the ultimate in good luck because I will have been able to spend those years with Lynda, and I could fill another blog with why that is the ultimate in good luck. So if you have been paying attention and following my ramblings closely, you can see how eating blackeyed peas can lead to the very best in luck. Get out there in 2012 and plant some super-foods and you too can have the good luck of living to the century mark, or beyond. Happy New Year!!!!