Yarden Walkabout March 7, 2012

Posted on Mar 7, 2012

I thought I’d walk around and see what is blooming today. The flowering quince is “Crimson & Gold” and it just gets lovelier when the green leaves come out.

The daffodils are going strong…

Lovely sedum rosettes: peeping up.

Dandelion! I love these little yellow flowers and can’t believe people poison them. They are so important to bees who are out looking for nectar and pollen to raise up the baby bees this time of year. I can’t have enough dandelions!

Pretty little henbit (above), which along with deadnettle (below) are more important early flowers for foraging honeybees. Larrapin bees seem to prefer the deadnettle….

The tiny stars of spring beauty are all over the yard. Now who would want boring grass when you can have all these blooms..even though many folks would call these weeds?

Now here’s a vegetable that grows as well as a weed: volunteer Ragged Jack Kale. We’ve been eating off the patch in the garden all winter. This one is by itself in the upper flower & herb beds.

And unlike the “Flaming Fury” peach, this variety (name is slipping my mind right now!) is a little more hesitant. Which seems wise since it’s still early March!

Thanks for joining me on an early Spring walkabout at Larrapin Garden… May Spring be here to stay.

Seeds Arrive from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

Posted on Feb 5, 2012

It’s that time of the year when I love to open the mailbox because a new shipment of seeds has arrived. From the number of seeds I tend to order, you would think I’m planting up the back 40 acres instead of one veggie plot (and ok, the areas around that fence, various flower beds, the old garden spot that I’m still messing around with, and some new spots I’m itching to plow, etc).

A word of warning: If you—or your spouse—has just started gardening, be aware that this is how it progresses. First there’s a “garden bed” and then, the yard, and then, well…, just remember to stop at your property lines…unless you’ve worked that out with the neighbors…HA!

The first shipment of the year is from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange out of Virginia. First let me say, I’m already in love with these guys I first found at the SSAWG conference this year. Southern Exposure’s catalog is full of words like “heat-loving,” “drought-tolerant” and “cabbage-worm resistant.” That got my attention. They specialize in varieties adapted for the South and even though NW Arkansas is on the upper left edge of  the South, last summer’s heat dome got me more interested in heat tolerant plants in a hurry.

Not to mention that Larrapin Garden is now classified as Zone 7, up from Zone 6 when we arrived six years ago… So it’s feeling more Southern than ever before, with a strong dose of Oklahoma thrown in for good measure. So I’m in the market for tough plants that taste great and that’s what Southern Exposure is all about.

Then my shipment arrived promptly, and beautifully packaged. The small seed packets were even bundled together and neatly wrapped in recycled seed-catalog pages. I’ve never opened such a lovely box and it not be Christmas or a birthday. Bravo and you have a new loyal customer!

Some new varieties I’m trying this year are “Big Red Ripper Cowpeas,” and “Green Glaze Collards.” Plus I ordered some buckwheat for a summer cover crop that the bees love. Oh and some hull-less oats to try as a cover crop that I could also feed the chickens. And a new watermelon variety. OH and a tomato named “Mule Team” that I just had to try. And of course I had to sample their variety of purple hull peas… And… well, you get the picture.

Since I’m enamored of seed saving lately I’m choosing mostly open-pollinated varieties and some heirlooms as well. (And wow, can’t wait to tell you about what I’m learning from writer, geneticist and plant breeder Carol Deppe, author of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving. Deppe is my new SHE-RO!! But back to today’s post…)

There’s so much to tell you but things have been crazy-busy for winter around here because the Dig In! Food & Farming Festival is just around the corner (see below) and lordy it’s almost time to start seeds inside! Plus there’s the puzzle of if I even need to start new kale and spinach seedlings since my garden’s full of both thanks to our nonexistent winter (so far, knocking on wood here.).  So I’ll close for today with a roaring recommendation for my new favorite seed company, now alongside old favorites like Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and Peaceful Valley Farm Supply.

p.s. If you are looking for spring planting dates for your area, this handy calculator over at Skippy’s Vegetable Garden is a good one.

—A Larrapin Garden.  Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Please  subscribe to get the posts in one weekly email. You can also get bonus links, giveaways and recipes by “liking” our Facebook page or following on Twitter.

Dig In Food & Farming Festival

Are you in the Northwest Arkansas region? Please join us for the 2nd annual Dig In! on March 2nd & 3rd. It’s going to be great fun with films, an info-fair, free seed swap, and classes on gardening, backyard chickens and more. Please check out the website at www.diginfestival.com for more info and sign up for email updates there.  Update: Dig In! tentative schedule to be posted later today!

Seed Swaps! Info to get you started [From Feb. 2011]

Posted on Feb 5, 2012

Snow, Snow, More Snow at Larrapin...

[Encore post from 2/2011] It’s the time of year I start to see announcements of community seed exchanges.  (See end of post for details.)  There are few things more fun for a gardener to do during winter than to get to explore a new seed stash. Especially when the weather has looked like the photo above  for days and days!

Seed exchanges can range from large scale community free for alls to invitation-only swaps for specialty plant geeks! But there are a few things to keep in mind during seed exchanges—or even when you are shopping seed catalogs—that will greatly increase your chances at success with the seeds you bring home.

You know you can’t save seed from grocery produce, but not everyone understands this.

At a seed exchange, it’s vital to know the person who is sharing the seeds. There are many well-intentioned folks who will save seeds from a particularly good melon or tomato from the store. “But I got it from the co-op…it was organic,” someone once told me. Most produce, even at the crunchiest co-op, are from hybrids unless they are explicitly labeled “heirloom” or similar. This includes much of the produce at farmers’ markets too. Market growers—including totally organic growers—often need the reliability, production and disease resistance that hybrids provide. Even “heirloom” produce from a store is unlikely to produce true to type (i.e. like the parent plant) because if it was grown for produce (vs. seed production) then it’s likely there were open-pollinated varieties nearby and in all likelihood they cross-pollinated! (And thus have created a hybrid, but with unknown attributes…)

Similarly, if you save seed from a great plant you bought as a seedling at most stores, it was likely a hybrid and there’s no point in saving seeds. The exception would be an heirloom (open-pollinated) seedling you bought, then followed plant isolation guidelines to keep the seed pure.

Heirloom and Open-Pollinated seeds may not produce as abundantly or reliably as hybrids.

I’ve seen folks avoid hybrids (usually labeled F1) in the seed catalogs as if they were kryptonite. Right now heirlooms (old-fashioned, open-pollinated varieties from which you can save seed to plant the next year if you follow basic seed-saving rules) are so popular that many folks forget why hybrids were developed in the first place: to accentuate certain aspects of the plant or to overcome weaknesses.

Many of us are returning to heirlooms to capture amazing flavors that, for example, are too delicate to ship. But hybrids are not some scary GMO thing. If you have say, a tomato that is wonderfully tasty but takes many months to bear, a grower might cross it with another tomato that bears early, hoping to combine the two desirable qualities. This is something you can do in your own backyard. We’re not talking crossing that tomato with a…fish, which is the level that GMO manipulation can stoop too.

Hybrids are not bad things, they just don’t produce true to type if you save the seed. So, while that does open them up to economic control such as that hybrid being “owned” by a seed producer (including the truly unsavory types, like Monsanto, who is also hard at work on particularly noxious GMOs) but hybrids are not scary. Sometimes they are very useful for specific purposes. For example, if you are growing a tomato in a northern climate, you may want the earliness some hybrids produce rather than the heirlooms, which tend to require a longer season.

Open-Pollinated Seeds may have cross pollinated and not turn out true to type if they were not isolated for seed production.

It is pretty astounding how much space is required to isolate wind or insect pollinated vegetables, like beets or squash. For beets it’s five miles and for squash it’s a half a mile! So that means, if you are growing one type of squash to save seed, and you are sure there are no other gardens within a half mile that are growing squash, then when you save the seed, they will grow true to type. The other option is an amazing dance between you and the squash that involves taping the flower shut after you’ve hand pollinated it, then monitoring to make sure bees don’t chew through the bloom to undo your work!

So before you use valuable space in your garden to grow out some free seeds you picked up at a seed exchange, find out if the seeds are going to be what you hope by talking to the gardener sharing them! Maybe the seeds were extra from a seed pack they bought. Maybe they carefully save seeds every year using isolation techniques. Maybe those seeds have been in their family for years. Or maybe not. Find out before you spend a season hoping for a cool veggies, only to be disappointed.

How on earth, you may wonder, did our grandparents manage to save seed that grew true year to year? From the older gardeners in my family, they tended to pick one type of bean, or one type of pea, and grow it year after year in the family garden…which used to be a lot farther away from neighboring gardens! But you don’t have to settle for one variety in your isolated valley or holler! Seed saving is an amazing art and skill, one well worth learning. In an upcoming post, I’ll tell you about some seed saving techniques I’ve just recently learned. In the meantime, here are some seed saving links to get you started, here, here and here. [Encore post from 2/2011]

My Seed Stash...

—A Larrapin Garden.  Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Please  subscribe to get the posts in one weekly email. You can also get bonus links, giveaways and recipes by “liking” our Facebook page or following on Twitter.

Dig In Food & Farming Festival

Are you in the Northwest Arkansas region? Please join us for the 2nd annual Dig In! on March 2nd & 3rd. It’s going to be great fun with films, an info-fair, free seed swap, and classes on gardening, backyard chickens and more. Please check out the website at www.diginfestival.com for more info and sign up for email updates there.

Why Start a Light Table Now? So you’ll have transplants to play with! [from 4/2011]

Posted on Feb 5, 2012

[From 4/2011] How I stayed sane in week of pouring rain…Playing with plants on the light table!

Getting these little guys ready to go in individual paper pots…

And visualizing the future beets and basil and more in this tray above.

Meanwhile, these guys above just need some warm weather and a garden bed that isn’t ‘too wet to plough!’ ( I love that expression even though we do essentially no-till after first breaking ground….but do use a tiller to break ground in order to avoid broken legs and knees!) Am running out of shelf space…send blue skies!

Want to make your own light table for seed starting? Here’s how: http://larrapin.us/?p=194

—A Larrapin Garden. Thanks for reading this “encore” post from April 2011. Newest blog posts are at www.larrapin.us

Homemade Light Table for Seedlings (from Feb 2011)

Posted on Feb 1, 2012

Shelves + Lights = Seed Starting Machine!

[Encore post from 2/2011] On Sunday, February 13th the seed starting bug HIT me. I cleaned the clutter that had accumulated on the seed starting shelf I made last year (funky, but it works great!) and got going! First I wanted to add some protection since the shelf is now living in a semi-heated workshop space and had a roll of silver bubble wrap available. With the heat of the lights and the seed-starting mat, should be warm enough on cold nights. The silver bubble wrap (foil insulation from Lowe’s) also works to reflect the light, which is good.

With reflector-insulation and a plastic drape...

Finished up with a drape of leftover yellow plastic tablecloth. The whole workshop kind of glows screaming lemon now, but Ada the farmdog has shown no ill effects from sharing her sleeping space with this contraption…

Starter trays

That tray on the right is hard to find but really handy. I think I got this one from Johnny’s.  It gives you about twenty narrow “furrows” to start seeds. Once they pop up, I transplant to individual cups. That was I can start a *lot* of varieties in a small space. I have only one small seed-starting mat (like a heating pad for plants) and this fits on top of it. The bottom heat makes things sprout really, really fast but once the cool-weather seedlings are up, they will grow happily with no additional heat other than the lights…

Heat-mat shown on lower shelf...

This pic shows how many trays I can get going on just two lit shelves. The seed-start tray will be on the heat mat (for a few days) then the seedlings will be spread out in individual cups in the regular trays. Each shelf has two sets of lights, so I can line up the trays side to side and get four on a shelf…

Kale at 72 hours!!

The heat mat makes a real difference. Check out the kale that poked up in 48hrs and was as above in 72hrs!

Closer to the lights...

Once the seedlings start to pop up, I remove the mat and use a spare tray to put them all very close to the lights. This is another thing that makes a BIG difference: having the lights only a couple inches above the leaves. Your seedlings will be stocky and dark green this way, rather than pale and spindly. (This is why the lights are on chains to raise/lower when the seedlings are bigger.)

I’ll check back and show the results in a few days!

Bees in January…er, what?

Posted on Jan 25, 2012

Wait, it goes beyond blooms because there’s one of the golden girls having a great time with those early blooms!

A flower and a bee: the perfect combination.

While I’m happy to see the bees, this too-warm trickery winter can be treacherous for them. The warm weather lures them out to fly around and burn up too much energy when there’s very little for them to find to eat. Plus, they may start raising young bees too early, only to have bad loss when the weather snaps back to real winter, which is more likely then not.  So I hope they will sense somehow, that this warm weather is fickle and not to be trusted….

…unlike Hearld the metal chicken, which can be trusted to keep an eye on things, even a flowering quince blooming a couple of months too early.

—A Larrapin Garden.  Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Please  subscribe to get the posts in one weekly email. You can also get bonus links, giveaways and recipes by “liking” our Facebook page or following on Twitter.

Dig In Food & Farming Festival

Are you in the Northwest Arkansas region? Please join us for the 2nd annual Dig In! on March 2nd & 3rd. It’s going to be great fun with films, an info-fair, free seed swap, and classes on gardening, backyard chickens and more. Please check out the website at www.diginfestival.com for more info and sign up for email updates there!

“Good Lord what humus!” So true…

Posted on Jan 18, 2012

I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers;
he is a man who cultivates the soil. He is a creature who digs
himself into the earth and leaves the sight of what is on it to us
gaping good-for-nothings. He lives buried in the ground. He
builds his monument in a heap of compost. If he came into the
Garden of Eden, he would sniff excitedly and say:
Good Lord, what humus!

– Karel Capek, The Gardener’s Year, 1931

(Photos from Fall 2011, Larrapin Garden)

—A Larrapin Garden.  Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Please  subscribe to get the posts in one weekly email. You can also get bonus links, giveaways and recipes by “liking” our Facebook page or following on Twitter.

Great Quote by Carol Deppe

Posted on Jan 11, 2012

“One of the most joyous things we can do is to find our place,

the land we fit into, the land where we belong.

Having found our place, we snuggle into it, learn about it, adapt to it, and accept it fully.

We love and honor it. We rejoice in it. We cherish it.

We become native to the land of our living.”

—Carol Deppe in The Resilient Gardener.

Stuff I Learned Gardening Last Year: Seeds & Bees

Posted on Jan 7, 2012

When you garden, it’s a sobering fact that you only have so many practice runs (gardening seasons) in a lifetime.  A musician might get to practice a particular song hundreds of time to get it right. Unless you are remarkably long lived, gardeners my age might only have 20 or 30 more times to get really good at it and that’s if you happen to get really lucky in life too! Things like summer-heat-domes, spring floods,  or a season off with a bum shoulder can be a real setback. So I’ve found that doing a lot of different things in the garden—things that cover different seasons, or add to the garden in different ways, mean a lot.

As have mentioned in posts past, I paid more attention to seed saving in 2011 than ever before. The photo above shows seeds of New Zealand Spinach collected just before our first killing frost. The top ones were already dry and hard when I collected them. They look like the seeds in packets I’ve bought. The green seeds have since dried out, but I’m not sure if that affects germination. I’ll find out this Spring I hope.

One great thing about seed saving over time is that you end up selecting for plants suited to your very particular setting. This is what makes heirloom seeds so special. You also get to see natural variations in the seeds you grow out like the Larrapin Kale I’m working on. Below is another photo of this gorgeous leaf that appeared among the grown out seeds I saved. Around it you can see the more typical “Ragged Jack” leaves.

Next year I plan to let only these particular wide-leaf plants go to seed, then collect seed again to see if I can get  a kale that consistently shows this leaf. A garden is nothing if not an experiment! And who will be helping me cross pollinate those lovely plants — why the bees of course! I cannot even describe how much joy having beehives at Larrapin has been. Words fail me, but the determination to become adept at beekeeping, is securely on my bucket list…

I’d love to hear your comments. You can click here to comment  and share your garden news.

—A Larrapin Garden ~ Posts most wednesdays & weekends. Don’t miss any—please  subscribe by Email here to get the posts in one weekly email. You can also get bonus links, giveaways and recipes by “liking” our Facebook fan page atwww.facebook.com/larrapin.garden. We’re even on Twitter athttp://twitter.com/LarrapinGarden.

Larrapin Garden Blog Has Moved!

Posted on Dec 28, 2011

For the holidays 2011, I decided to finally move the blog over to its own domain: www.larrapin.us. Please visit and bookmark! Better yet, please re-subscribe so that you’ll get the posts by email. I hope you will re-subscribe because there will be exciting new soon about the 2012 Dig In! Food and Farming Festival here in Fayetteville. Plus, we’re going to be building a new banty-tractor and a hoophouse here over the winter!  To get the new email subscription:  It’s a two step process, first click the link above. Then enter your email and the letters shown and click the “subscribe” button.  Step two is to check your email box and click that long “confirm” link that you really want to the get post in one neat weekly email. Then you’re in! Welcome back! And visit the new blog at www.larrapin.us. 🙂