November 25, 2013

Today the garden is in the full glory of seasonal transition. The summer/fall plants have died off or have slowed down. The winter plants are starting slowly and are not yet taking off. The last 2 weeks of November and the first 2 weeks of December are the most depressing because things seem to have paused. But it's a good time to clean out the garden, to remove weeds, to realign the garden rows. Time to repair or erect trellises, make raised beds, expand the garden size. Its an excellent time to sow seeds in the greenhouse and put transplants out up into the garden. So there is plenty to do, but not much harvesting going on. 

We've gotten a fairly good handle on the weeds. There are still a couple of sections that need digging and de-grassing, but we are catching up. Missy and Sue harvested one of the sweet potato patches, with very poor yields, thus a giant patch of invasive grass was eliminated. Why did the sweet potatoes yield so poorly? Was it the variety? Perchance not suited to Hawaii? Was it the invading grass? Was it the time of year? We really don't have the answer. The variety was a new one for us, but we won't bother trying it again, we already have a few nice producing varieties that we will now stick with. 

Walking around and inspecting the garden we saw that many seedlings have disappeared. We know that we have a cutworms problem, but the losses are pretty heavy. Could it be our ducks? Possibly but they have been observe rejecting those potential nibblies in the past. Could it be turkeys? A more likely culprit. In the past they have been caught in the act pulling out beets and onion plants, eating peas and beans, ripping lettuce and spinach. Controlling turkeys is going to be tough. They use to avoid our scarecrows and bird chasers, but now they ignore them. Turkeys might be a challenge! 

Missy, Linda and Alice pulled and planted lots of strawberry plants today, potting them up for future sale. Lots of sweet potato cuttings also were potted up since we have recently been getting requests for them. 

Sweet potatoes can be propagated in a couple of ways. The quickest and easiest way for us is to take tip cuttings and simply plant them into soil. They readily root. Simple and quick. Another way to propagate sweets is by planting a tuber and allowing it to sprout. As it sprouts, the slips are snapped off and planted into a pot (or directly into the ground). This method is good for creating new plants when someone gives us a tuber of a new variety. We usually get 6-12 slips off a tuber. Sometimes more. 

The keyhole garden #2 is now ready for its soil cap. We added a bit more biotrash (sugar cane leaves, old veggie plants, weeds) and stomped it down good. Finally, we get to top it off! 

Sharon, Vicky, Marta, and Babette worked on the main section of garden, cleaning it up, removing old growth, planting new rows. Steps were taken to prevent the cutworms from eating the seedlings. We use both toilet paper rolls and plastic milk jug bottoms. They help. 

There are still yacon tubers in the ground, but we didn't harvest any today. Maybe next week volunteers will want some. There are also plenty of bok choy that can be taken. The daikon is growing well but it is still small. It's been sprayed with dipel in hopes of preventing maggot damage. We lost the precious crop to maggots in the roots. The frying peppers are producing again and we harvested today. Lots of oranges were picked. A few avocados came down and are ready for eating. Sprouting broccoli is producing. The florets are small on sprouting broccoli but they are good eating. Zucchini, green beans, and yard long beans were harvested for lunch. 

The sugar cane is producing massive canes. Some canes are 3 inches across! It makes it difficult to harvest them. Sharon struggled and successfully harvested a number of canes. Today seemed like a good day to get the sugar cane press working, so we juiced a 3 foot section of cane. I was surprised to see just how much juice got produced. 2 whole quarts! That's impressive. The rest of the harvested cane will be pressed later today with the juice going into the freezer for future lunches. 

With so many oranges being harvested today we opted to juice a bunch. Yum, fresh orange juice. Last year the oranges were disappointing, but this year they are yummy. Another crop that was poor quality last year is the avocados. This year they are quite respectable. We're not sure why these two crops were so disappointing last year but just fine this year. We still have much to learn about gardening! 

Lunch today included stewed local grass fed beef with snow peas (snow peas donated from Sue J's garden), fried potatoes, steamed zucchini (our own, amazing isn't it!), sautéed green beans and yard long beans (both fresh right out of the garden today). Fresh orange juice and sugar cane juice for dessert.