Starting the Winter Gardening Experiment

I have been reading a lot of Eliot Coleman's books lately.  He is a guru when it comes to organic growing and growing in the wintertime.  He grows over 30 varieties of vegetables year-round in an unheated greenhouse in Zone 5, even harvesting carrots and lettuce in December.  His books are definitely worth a read if you are interested in organic gardening techniques or growing in the winter.  They will get you excited about gardening.  His most recently published book just came out a few months ago, The Winter Harvest Handbook.  I am using the book to experiment for the first time with winter gardening.

My first planting is carrots only.  I filled a Rubbermaid container with really good dirt I dug from the cow pasture and then sowed my seed.  Then I covered the top with a row cover to try to hold the moisture in.  Carrot seeds love being moist and relatively cool for the best germination.  I only left about 3 or 4 inches between the rows because in the winter, plants need to be more closely spaced to hold their heat.  I plan on growing them in the open container until the first frost.  Then I will cover them with a plastic hoop that I am constructing right now (plans and photos are coming up).  The back half of the tub is planted with Danvers and the front half is Scarlet Nantes.

Carrots take anywhere from 2-3 weeks to germinate, so it will look like just a tub of dirt for a while.  I guess it didn't look all that uninviting for someone, though.  I'm going to have to figure out what to do about this before the seedlings start coming up!

A Ripe One...Finally!

I finally got a cantaloupe!  My vines are getting destroyed by cucumber beetles, and this little cantaloupe didn't look like he was getting any nutrients from the vine he was attached to, so I decided to go ahead and pick him.  He was a little bit green yesterday, but after a night out on the counter, he was ready to go this morning.  And he tasted GREAT!  I've got three other melons out on the vines still that should be ready within the next couple of days.

When you buy melon seeds, it will say on the package that cantaloupe should be harvested at 3/4 slip.  That just means that it should come off the vine with a gentle tug.  For other types of melons, it might say full slip.  That means that it should come off the vine extremely easily with no pressure.  Most cantaloupe have a heavy netting around them, so you can tell they are ready to harvest when the spaces in between the netting go from green to tan.  Also, once you pick a melon from the vine, it will continue to ripen.  However, the amount of sugar in the melon is set.  It will not get any sweeter.  So you do want to try to pick it at the peak of ripeness.

Growing Herbs Indoors

Even though we are just entering late August, the cool weather we have been having reminds me that winter is not far around the corner. This winter, I am going to try an outdoor growing experiment with carrots and lettuce. I am also going to be growing a few things indoors. I found a really cute kit at Walmart for a great price! At my local grocery store, it will cost $3 to buy one teeny packet of less-than-fresh herbs this winter, so I snapped up the kit.

The kit includes 3 three-inch ceramic pots, a ceramic tray to set them on, a soiless potting mixture, and herb seeds. The kit I chose includes basil, thyme, and sage. As a bonus, there are quite a few seeds left over to plant in the garden outdoors next year.

Growing herbs indoors is easy if you set them in a south-facing window. I planted mine about 10 days ago, and the herbs are already growing like crazy.