starting seedlings

Busy sowing seeds, we did two flats yesterday, one with tomatoes and peppers and one with brocolli, cabbage and some brussels sprouts. The tomatoes and peppers are for the greenhouse, next month we'll seed more for the veggie yard. We used cut down yoghurt containers as markers, they're easy to write on and don't mind the wet.

Free Seed Cabinets for our community.

One more gardening thing, and then it is time for lunch...

When planning your vegetable and flower gardens do not forget to check out the Free Seed Cabinets at Cooperative Extension this time of year! I am sure I blogged about this before, I love the program! This program is until supplies run out, in addition to the previously blogged Community Seed Swap coming weekend.

http://ccetompkins.org/garden/help-gardeners/free-seed-cabinets#sthash.to5Rgm2A.dpuf
the Free Seed Cabinets

Each year, staff in our Home Horticulture program write to various seed companies to request donations of seeds that are leftover from the previous year, but still viable.  CCE-Tompkins receives many generous seed donations in response to this appeal (including many organic seeds) from vendors that have included Ithaca Agway, Seed Savers Exchange, FEDCO, Burpee, Heirloom Seeds, Seed Saver Exchange, Select Seeds, Harris Seeds, and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, for example.  There is a cabinet for flowers, and another cabinet for vegetables and herbs.

How It Works

Seed packets are organized in 2 cabinets, one for flowers, another for vegetables and herbs.  Everyone is welcome to come and take some seeds for free, but to keep the system fair, we've had to put these GUIDELINES into place which seed-takers must follow:  ONLY 1 VISIT PER MONTH and a LIMIT OF 10 SEED PACKETS PER VISIT.

So that we can track the success of the free seed program, we ask those taking seeds to write down their name, email and number of seeds they have taken.  Seeds generally are available starting in late January until the supply is gone.

We ALSO invite gardeners to contribute accurately identified and dated seed (date of seed collection) to the Seed Cabinet for others to share.  We have small envelopes here, or you may use your own, but be sure to put the year of seed collection on the envelope, as well as the name of the plant. NOTE: all donated seeds should be given to Pat Curran, our Horticulture Educator, for review before we make them available to the public.

The Seed Cabinets are located in our Agriculture/Environment office and may be visited weekdays from 8:30am-4:30pm.  Tompkins County Cornell Cooperative Extension is located at 615 Willow Avenue in Ithaca (Dey St. exit from Route 13).

some greenhouse thoughts...

My new gardening goal for this season is to try and really extend our season by start planting our greenhouse much earlier. I normally preseed tomatoes and bellpeppers sometime mid April for planting Memorial Day weekend, but since most of those now life indoors I will preseed them with my leeks and brassica in mid February. Yes, we might get a cold snap, but it is easy enough to run a small heater in the greenhouse at night and it warms up really fast during the day.

Plus, I prepared the bed ahead of time to seed some lettuce and other leafy greens real early. Last season I sowed bok choy early with not much success, but the greenhouse might still have been to chilly for them. This year I'll use more cold hardy seeds like mustard greens, and lettuce mix, which I noticed seeded itself in my cold frame and came up the next year with no issues at all!

 Instead of mulching with organics as I do in the rest of my gardens - the greenhouse does not get enough moisture for quick decomposition in winter - I remove the top couple inches of spent dirt and replace it with 2 year old composted horse manure I then dig in. Plus I do not like the tomatoes etc to seed themselves out each season and removal of the top layer also removes the seeds. I like having a couple wheelbarrows of soil to play with, either to dump & raise swamp hiking paths or to pot up suckers and seeders for a quick sale in spring! One can never have enough dirt...

Might I have mentioned I've got gardening on my mind today?!

Community Seed Swap

Community Seed Swap & Guidelines

Bring your home-saved seeds (or surplus purchased seeds) to share with others, pick up some seeds for spring planting, learn how to clean seeds, and get tips on starting plants from seed for next year's garden. Cost: $5.00 donation, or free if you bring seeds to share! See below for guidelines if you plan to bring seeds to share. Contact Chrys Gardener at cab69@cornell.edu if you have any other questions.

Seed Swapping Guidelines

- It's ideal if you can pre-package small seeds in individual envelopes. Sometimes with small seeds, people don't realize how much they are taking. By pre-packaging there will be more to go around.  Write the name of the variety and the year collected on the envelopes. Large seeds (corn, beans, etc) can be loose for people to package themselves.
-  People will have questions about the varieties you are swapping - how tall does it get, how many days till harvest, what's the flavor like, etc. Know your varieties, and if you want to save yourself from repeating the same information you can make an index card with information for each of the  varieties you are swapping.

Home-Saved Seed

- Be sure that you saved seeds from plants that were open-pollinated varieties, not hybrids, otherwise they will not come 'true-to-seed' for the next person that grows them. If you bought the plants from a garden center, the tag may say if it's a hybrid. If you started the plants from seed yourself the seed packet will say either open-pollinated or hybrid
- Some vegetables will cross-pollinate with other related plants, for example many types of winter and summer squash can cross producing sometimes inedible results in the next generation. Some plants are self-pollinated and are easy to save 'true' seed from without any isolation techniques - tomatoes, lettuce, peas, and beans are all generally considered 'fool-proof'. If you saved seeds from other types of vegetables without avoiding the possibility of cross pollination, just state that on the seed packets (eg. 'Possibly crossed with other squash').

Purchased Seed

- If you have extra quantities of purchased seed that you want to swap, you can bring both open-pollinated and hybrid varieties. Just make sure they are clearly labeled as such so that people who want to save seeds from them  know which is which.
- See more at: http://ccetompkins.org/calendar/13/11/06/community-seed-swap-guidelines#sthash.uIGajFUy.dpuf

I feel like gardening... it is sunny outside and it might be in the single digits and everything covered in snow, but from behind my computer it looks great! So I am thinking gardening thoughts instead... which brings me to the Cooperative Extension Community Seed Swap coming Sunday February 2nd from 10am to 3pm. I already sorted and bagged my seed surplus, and are ready to go, how about you?!

Community Seed Swap

Bring your home-saved seeds (or surplus purchased seeds) to share with others, pick up some seeds for spring planting, learn how to clean seeds, and get tips on starting plants from seed for next year's garden. Cost: $5.00 donation, or free if you bring seeds to share! See below for guidelines if you plan to bring seeds to share. Contact Chrys Gardener at cab69@cornell.edu if you have any other questions.

It's ideal if you can pre-package small seeds in individual envelopes. Sometimes with small seeds, people don't realize how much they are taking. By pre-packaging there will be more to go around.  Write the name of the variety and the year collected on the envelopes. Large seeds (corn, beans, etc) can be loose for people to package themselves.

See more at: http://ccetompkins.org/calendar/13/11/06/community-seed-swap-guidelines#sthash.uIGajFUy.dpuf

I feel like gardening...

But it is only mid April! I did finally make a brick path in my flower & herb garden, which will make navigating it in summer much easier! Before the self seeding flowers loved to seed into the wood mulch path (they actually seeded more on the path than on the dirt...) and I felt bad about weeding out flower so left them and before you knew it the whole thing was impassible. So, with the left over bricks from the green house project (a lot of these have holes in them, are hollow bricks) a new path is made. If only I had started at the beginning and not at the end... I miss about 16 inches to reach the gate :)

winterizing the gardens

 We're getting there! First removed the dried up tomato and squash plants for the bonfire - don't want to infect my compost - removed anything that died with the first frosts, like the sweet potato vines and tender leavy greens (next year pull them just before and feed to goats) - pulled the last weeds and self sown leafy greens for the goats, we had about five wheelbarrows of yummie treats - and harvesting the last produce like the Indian Corn... Then add veggie food!

 Making room in my veggie garden kick starts the cleaning spree in my livestock barns as well - clean the chicken coop and spread the litter all over the garden beds, clean the horse and goat stalls and spread the manure all over the garden beds (including the weekly wheelbarrow of poopies from the pasture as Greni poops only outdoors), clean the lawn of any leaves (mulch with mower then vacuum with mower) and add any woodstove ash leftovers to make room in the bin for this winter's supply. And not to forget: pick up any bagged up leaves in town I can find! This year I think I added about 4 car loads of leaves, and I squeeze 8 bags at a time in my poor Volvo :)

Here the garden is starting to get it's blanket of organic matter (and you can see the new fence, so much nicer than the pallets, hihi). I leave most of the leafy greens like chard and collard greens; I can slowly feed the leaves to the goats but also with a mild winter they'll survive (and go to seed).

 Right now the garden has two area's of greens, a patch of garlic & leeks and the rest is a 6 inch layer of stuff - I really hate to see exposed dirt in winter. And every year I contemplate sowing a cover crop but don't get to it, and every year I'll think: next year will be the year I'll have my act together! Right.

Our fall sure was beautiful!

Picture perfect breeding pair American Buff geese Emily (back) and Kristopher.

Something came up out of the lawn... cause it had finally rained!

Our lean to green house

 Finally our greenhouse is finished! Tho these pics are from this spring and therefor not all that up to date :) The greenhouse is made with a locally harvested and milled hemlock frame, salvaged window sides and a greenhouse plastic sheeting roof.

I picked up insulated 4 foot square windows on craigslist right at the time we started construction, which meant I had saved up WAY to many little windows over the years! It took many, many listings on Freecycle to free up that space again! The double hung windows front and back can open and are instrumental in summer for a cooling breeze. There is also a one foot wide opening in the roof under the shed overhang that's open (screened) which helps with passive airflow. Initially I had installed bug screen but then found the plants were not fruiting (DUH!) so exchanged that with chicken wire (pollinators in, chickens out) and before I knew the plants were setting loads of fruit.

The rubbermade tub in front of the greenhouse is for the ducks and geese. There is a gutter spout right over it (from the shed overhang) so with enough rain it self fills and self cleans real nicely. About once a month I empty it out and dump all the water and mud in the greenhouse - with all the fowl poopies it's the perfect poopie tea!

 It was a joy having our tomatoes in it, and also, to have early and late greens like chard and mizuna. I ended up bricking the central path, don't want to weed that, but I also ended up removing most of the oregano as it grew right over the path and was too hard to navigate thru. This summer we grew mostly tomato with some pepper and basil. Next year the basil will go where the oregano was so they don't get as easily overgrown with the monster tomato plants.

I also added a flower garden in front of the greenhouse, initially to sow flowers - hence the fence, to keep the chickens out of the seeds. It morphed into a perennial herbal tea and soap garden with lots of bee balm and European stinging nettle for tea and chamomile & comfrey for soap making. Nice! I ended up running my solar dryer for most of the summer...

Exploring the new woods

 In preparation for a horse I started to look around for places to walk and ride next to and near our property. Low and behold, from the town's tax maps I found a 10 acre lot right next to us that is landlocked (no road access) and has no house. I did track down, using google, in a rather roundabout way, that it belongs to the people on the other side. So one afternoon I put on my "courageous shoes", grabbed the kid for dimple equity and visited the nice lady to ask for permission. Which was no problem at all, she had't been or seen that part of her property in more than 20 years and her only request was that she could come and see it some day herself... Well, of course!

Unfortunately it's not really suited for horses, even ponies, as it really is a wetland (it's part of a New York State Protected Wetlands Area) and parts of it are too muddy. The dogs and the goat do fine, but eight hundred pounds on four little hooves were apparently too much - he sank to his knees, just about! My heart sank too, I envisioned having to get a crane in to suck him back out...

 

Especially in Spring Simon and I hiked the "Buurman Pad" almost weekly. Lately the weeds have been a little too much for Simon, they grew just about as tall as he is and now he wants his dad to mow it first. With the dry spring parts of it are pretty dried up tho and much easier to hike, when it is wet there are one or two area's with creek like tendencies - I might need to put some bits of boardwalk down here as well.

In de pic above Simon is checking out a hollow tree - a gnome house - while carrying his butterfly catching net and house. We did not catch anything that day but did enjoy all the yellow marsh flowers.

This is the beginning behind the shed - the easy part thru pretty dry woods with not too dense shrubbery. I did misread the tax map, turns out they do not show structures accurately (it's computer generated) and started the hike on our other neighbors land (our property is long and skinny so we have two neighbors on each side) but he did not mind and uses it to walk his dogs whenever he petsits our goats. It took about two weeks of daily afternoon exercise to make a path that takes maybe 15 minutes to walk...

Stretching the wood pasture fence

 Finally, after two years a bit of work here and a bit of work there we put our hands together, asked the help of some friends (dutch friend Quirine and the parents of Simon's playmate - all wanted to learn how to install wire fencing anyway) and stretched the new fence! Last spring I had pounded all the posts, a few at a time, which worked ok as it was a wet spring and the ground fairly soft. I pulled a few crooked posts this spring, repounded them and it was a lot harder to get them in! But it was not bad at all to have postponed turns out, during a pretty severe windstorm our (one and only) black walnut uprooted and as it was designated as a corner post it would have taken the whole fence with it! Now I only had to reline a few posts after the tree was chopped down and out of the way...

 

Here hubby Rolf is stretching the woven wire fence. We had to do it in two stretches but could use a tree to hook the ratchet on to each time, which was nice. When we fenced the pasture we had to use the hitch on the Volvo a few times as there were no handy tree trunks around!

Behind the roll of wire is a gate between two close trees, that way we could walk all the way from the barn thru the pasture, thru the back gate, thru the woods pasture out the back door and connect to our swamp boardwalk for a nice stroll...

 

First part stretched, Quirine and Rolf enjoy a well deserved cup of coffee. Quirine plans to have goats at some point as well and liked seeing the process of properly installing a wire fence. Not all that difficult, and mostly all about the right equipment, as Simon (Sungiva's dad) demonstrated while securing the fence wire to the T posts "that's what you're supposed to use to twist the connectors?! no wonder it was so darn difficult when I did it..."

what the heck?!

While my hubbie was getting ready to mow he noticed a strange and muddy hole in the ground... with a large black and red turtle next to it! We have seen turtles on our land before but I never realized they live and  overwinter under our lawn - makes me feel a bit uneasy about driving over it with the volvo now, haha.

Our kid Simon was duly impressed and not getting any closer - you never know what kind of dragon head could come out of that shiny rock!

not so much fruit this year...

 This is what happened to one of our 10 year old apple trees last April's snow storm... Rolf is walking around with a big stick to shake the snow out of the trees, but it pretty much was already too late. We lost a lot of limbs, a few fruit tree tops, all the older wood of our 60+ year old lilac bush (the flat thing behind Rolf) and one of our larger dwarf trees completely toppled over. We tried to push it back - this is as far as it goes - and Rolf pruned most of the extra limbs off to give it a change. It still lives and go figure, it's the one with the most apples this year! I think next Spring we'll chainsaw it down and ent a couple of new shoots on it, the roots do seem to work fine and Rolf did do a pruning & enting workshop.

Our peaches didn't have much snow damage but the frost that came a little while after did take care of most of the blossoms. I think from the 8 or so trees we have only one fruited. Last week Rolf chopped our whole harvest (minus the ones the toddler ate) and it came to a whopping three quart bags total! And no pears at all. This would have been their first year and they were covered in blooms but the tiny fruit buds all blackened and then fell off... I was so disappointed.

Even our fruit shrubs are doing poorly, not from snow or frost but from lack of rain. The summer raspberries and blackberries only bore one crop quite some weeks (seems like months) ago and the blueberries are sooo tiny it's not quite worth picking them. Our fall bearing raspberries are only now starting to fruit a bit and they only grew to about 3-4 feet tall. Same for a lot of the weeds, our butterfly & hummingbird garden is normally taller than us this time of year and it never quite grew more than chest height. Not much of a maze if you can see the paths :)

Happy Valentine!

Found and photographed alongside Cayuga Lake last summer...

Although we have some sort of root cellar downstairs (the cement cubby where the well connects to the basement) it's damp so not that good for apples etc. With normal winter weather we've had great success keeping all the pumpkins, pears and apples in our sunroom - an unheated concrete floor east facing room, which does get below freezing if it's really cold outside, but also tends to cool down and heat up fairly tempered.

But this year, with the 50 degree sunny days our storage is going fast! I sure hope we'll last till March - most years we can still feed the girls some sort of funny looking apples & pumpkins but don't think this will be one of those years. On the other hand, it also means there is not much snow on the ground which helps foraging and stuff should start to grow pretty soon - unless we get a late winter to make up for the delay...

come birdie, birdie...

Our bird watcher in training, four year old Simon is using his small binoculars to look for birds. Don't think he found any, though... He's looking towards the recently 'discovered' back woods.

A pretty picture, one of the few nice winter images of this season. It felt more like spring today; no coats, upper 50's, and it's not even February yet :)

we reached the back woods

My son and I are slowly working our way thru our point eight of "useless" property, bush wacking paths and clearing waters. A big hurdle was a large willow that had fallen over my planned path and creek crossing. Last summer a friend of ours with a big chainsaw helped to cut it up and with some solid concrete blocks and heavy duty landscaping pallets we built a nice bridge over the creek. My little man loves going back here, to play in and with the water (there is always some flow) and gets some exercise to boot!

This was last week, when it actually looked like winter! The small creek was still flowing and Simon's big whoop was pushing snow into the water, both from the logs and the bridge.

This is the newest path - which looks a lot easier to hike this way with the thick snow fall, but is actually a mix of mud, water and grass humps. Between snows we've hauled most of our boardwalk pallets down here and have an initial path which come spring when things are not frozen to everything else I'll square off and screw in place. Our completed path goes thru a mix of woods, swamp, scrub (pic above), swamp, woods again and ends at a pond and this winter we finally made it to the back woods!

go organic - or not?

On the "dirty dozen" list are:

1. Apples
2. Celery
3. Strawberries
4. Peaches
5. Spinach
6. Imported nectarines
7. Imported grapes
8. Sweet bell peppers
9. Potatoes
10. Domestic blueberries
11. Lettuce
12. Kale/collard greens

The group also lists the "Clean 15," or those that rank lowest in pesticide residues. These are:

1. Onions
2. Sweet Corn
3. Pineapples
4. Avocado
5. Asparagus
6. Sweet peas
7. Mangoes
8. Eggplant
9. Domestic cantaloupe
10. Kiwi
11. Cabbage
12. Watermelon
13. Sweet Potatoes
14. Grapefruit
15. Mushrooms

After-the-Plant-Sale sale!

The After-the-Plant-Sale Sale
Wednesday, May 25, 4:00-7:00 pm
CCE-Tompkins, 615 Willow Avenue, Ithaca

The Master Gardener volunteers from Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County have some perennials left from the Plant Sale this past weekend, and Josh Dolan (who works with community gardens/Gardens4Humanity) has some veggie transplants and woodies left, so we are having a joint sale here at Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County, 615 Willow Avenue,
Ithaca.

Getting ready for yet another bonfire...

In the middle of the pic, right behind the mowers' trailer, is yet another bonfire pile! Hubbie and I have been cleaning out the back woods of all the maple that was left over from the large tree that came down. We had the bottom part milled, but the crown with all the small stuff was still there for us the clean up. And of course it had fallen right where I planned part of my woods path and new goat fence!

I use that yellow wood contraption in my tractor trailer to stack and haul scrub and it works like a charm. With that thingy I've been able to get most of the large loose stuff cleaned out. Last year I did not realize I could use our chop saw to cut smaller diameter wood to wood stove size so there is a large stack of relatively good wood left of the bonfire stack we're been slowly working our way thru. I do not feel like going thru it again to separate out the decent stuff. This year we did and now have quite the stack of small rounds in our fire wood house.

Saturday it's time for a bonfire again... hope the weather will hold!