This is a perfect time of year to be installing your vegetable starters. Just make sure to water adequately when it's hot to give your plants a chance to get established. This Sunday, June 1st, there's another chance to get your vegetable garden started. Come visit us at the South Side Farmer's Market at the Labor Temple
on the corner of Park Street and W. Wingra Drive from 11-3 on Sunday!!!
Many of our return customers have told us about the huge yields that our plants gave them last year and they are looking forward to what this season will bring!
We'll have plenty of veggie starters to
help you get you fill your garden with delicious peppers, cucumbers,
eggplant, melons, kale, broccoli, tomatoes, lettuce and more. Other
vendors will have early produce and hanging flower baskets.
$3.50 for large plants and $3 for smaller plants and price breaks on 4 plants or more. We hope to see you there!
Come visit us at the South Side Farmer's Market at the Labor Temple on the corner of Park Street and W. Wingra Drive from 11-3 today (Sunday May 25th) !!!
We'll have plenty of veggie starters to help you get you fill your garden with delicious peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, melons, kale, broccoli, tomatoes, lettuce and more. Other vendors will have early produce and hanging flower baskets.
$3 for large plants and 2$ for smaller plants. It's a beautiful day for planting. We hope to see you there!
Our first market of the season was great! It was nice to see some of our vendor friends once again on such a beautiful day, and to meet new people that stopped by to take a look and to buy some starter plants. We enjoy helping people figure out what they can grow in their garden and giving some tips on plants that might do especially well. If we can help people in the Madison area grow more of their own food, then we've accomplished our goal.
One thing I'm finding is that most people have a space to grow food. Even if it's only a small balcony, there are certain plants that will do well there without much space. Our hybrid cucumbers and better bush tomatoes are a great example. They stay small and compact but produce a lot of fruits. It's great to see people realize that the space that they thought was too small will actually work if they grow the right plants.
The best part of the day was a surprise visit from an old High School friend. He saw my post on facebook and decided to make a stop. And he left with a bunch of plants for his mom and dad to add to their garden! Thanks Andrew!
The other vendors were selling beautiful hanging baskets as well as fresh asparagus and onion scapes. There will be more coming in the next weeks as more and more produce becomes harvestable.
We'll be at the Labor Temple on Park Street from 11-3 on Sundays for the next 5 weeks selling starter plants such as tomato varieties, pepper varieties (hot and bell), cucumbers, brocolli, lettuce, kale, scallions and more. We'll be adding a couple other days of markets as well. Come check us out to say hi or to get your starters!
My friend and beekeeping mentor Robert Pierce called me today with excitement in his voice. The bees in his top-bar hive were flying around outside! They made it through the long, cold winter! With the warm weather that we were blessed with today, Robert encouraged me to go check my bees. I had a faint optimism that maybe one of the colonies survived. So when I got home from work I marched over the cold and muddy ground and up through the woods to the farm where my hives are.
There on the far side of the field the hives stood like three strange monoliths. I knew one of the colonies was dead for sure because it had been taken over by hornets in the fall for some reason. The other two were not the strongest colonies so I had left the majority of the honey they produced last summer and fall for them to consume over the winter in hopes that it would give them a chance to survive.
As I got about 100 feet away from the hives, my heart jumped as I clearly could see little dots zooming all around one of the hives! When I approached the hive up close I sensed that they were strong and vigorous, yet eager to find more food. There were bees coming and going, no doubt scouting for pollen and nectar. I was so happy and amazed at the site!
My next step will be to check their honey supplies. If they have a fair amount still, I probably will do nothing more than occasionally check on them. If they are low on honey, I'd like to feed them some syrup that I made with cane sugar and water. There are a number of ways to feed bees syrup.
I also need to clean up the other two hives and see if they are still habitable for a new colony. I suspect that the hive that was overrun with hornets had been weakened by mites earlier and if that's the case, it's not wise to re-use that hive because it can infect the next colony to live there. I'm pretty sure that the third colony perished over the winter but I did see some bees around it - possibly bees from the active hive checking to see if there was any honey in it. If everything looks good in the empty hives, I'd like to invite new colonies into them this spring and also expand to two additional hives as well.
Lord willing, it will be a great year for bees, pollination and honey!
Even though it's been raining and cold, that doesn't stop cool season crops from thriving in the mini hoophouse!! We've got a bunch of brocolli, kale and lettuce starters for sale...plus a variety of culinary herb starters.
Basil, coriander, dill, marjoram and oregano fresh or dried. Let us know if you are interested in our locally grown starters to get your garden underway. Summer varieties of starters coming up next month!
This year we've focused on growing leafy greens such as Kale (lacinto), Swiss Chard and Beets. With the Kale and Chard especially, we've probably harvested the tops of each young plant once a week or more since the beginning of May. That equals to over 20 times each plant. The leaves quickly regrow and are ready to be harvested again within a couple days.
Our breakfasts have greatly benefited from this. We've been able to add nearly a gallon-bucket worth of greens to our shakes every morning, in addition to water, hemp protein, maca, cashews, spirulina, raw honey, raw cocoa powder, ice cubes and occasionally Wisconsin ginseng. I can tell you that getting a large amount of fresh greens (and the other goodies) every morning has had a positive impact on our health. Plus, if we would have purchased those greens, we would have easily spent hundreds of dollars. And, the shakes are actually delicious and smooth!
I attribute the ability to harvest the greens so many times to the high-quality compost that we are directly growing them in. Essentially, we're using compost that is from brewer's mash (a good source of nitrogen), wood chips (a good source of carbon) and then various other items such as coffee grounds, vegetable waste, and mowed up leaves. The main thing is that you want about 75 percent of your materials to be a high carbon source and 25 percent to be from a high nitrogen source. Ultimately, a good compost will have a C:N ration of about 25:1 to 30:1.
If you're interested in learning more about composting, building compost bins out of recycled materials, or acquiring quantities of grow-ready compost, let us know how we can help!
In my past garden experiments, I've dealt with rabbits that love to strip small plants of their leaves, racoons that love to eat tomatoes and the occasional hot pepper and chipmunks that have extrasensory knowledge of exactly where I planted my squash seeds.
But this year, at my new location, I'm dealing with a whole new animal -- groundhogs. These pudgy, furry creatures otherwise known as woodchucks have become my new foe. Interestingly, the answer to the tongue twister "how much wood could a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?", is none. They actually aren't very interested in wood and are more interested in eating my garden and digging an impressive network of tunnels all around my yard.
Secret woodchuck hole in day lily patch
However, one morning I did see a young groundhog scurry out of the day lily patch behind the garden and climb right up a tree. Yes, it climbed up a tree. When I asked it what it was doing it promptly scurried back down the branch and back into the foliage, where it has a secret tunnel.
What started out as two groundhogs multiplied so we've had the pleasure of watching a whole herd of them grazing the clover in the field next to my yard. If all they ate was the clover, I'd have no problem with them. But they've become very good at shaving my kale, beets, broccoli, peppers, lettuce down to stubs. And chicken fencing hasn't stopped them. They climb right over.
So my wife and I have taken it upon ourselves to explore various ways of deterring these pesky pests.
Here are some of the solutions we've been working on to keep our gardens safe from our buck-toothed enemies:
Deer fencing
Live traps
Pest deterrent spray
Wrist rocket (Haven't gotten to that point yet)
Some other "methods" that my farmer friends have said work phenomenally but are probably not palatable to most audiences
Deer fencing was attached to our original chicken wire
Another method that seems to have worked with some success is shouting at them and being physically intimidating (that was actually a recommendation on a website I saw). I threw a chunk of soil at one while it was in my garden and it quickly climbed out and started for one of its holes. I threw another rock at it on its way back to its hole.
The rock hit the ground about a foot behind it and scared the thing so much that it literally flipped over on its back and let out a loud squeak.
This woodchuck ate that whole apple in about 30 seconds
For about a week after that encounter there was no sign of them in the garden. Then we noticed some more nibbled plants. So we set up the deer fencing.
That seemed to work fairly well except one morning as I was leaving for work I noticed a groundhog frantically trying to get out of the garden.
It seems it found a way under the deer fencing, but couldn't get out. I lowered the live trap into the garden and stood outside the fence, using a large stick I found to battle it into the trap.
After a prolonged struggle where it lunged at the stick and clicked its teeth together I was able to push it into the live trap without any injuries to it or me.
Unfortunately, it escaped the trap as I accidentally lifted the trap by the wrong handle and it opened the gate.e. But later that day, the trap actually caught one and I let it go at a nearby natural area.
Since then, I've caught four more of them including one large adult. Twice they've gotten themselves into the deer-fenced area where they can't get out on their own, which actually works in my favor. I've released all of them at the same location so hopefully they will re-unite as one big happy buck-toothed family.
Yet there are still at least two more in the yard. One huge adult and a young one. Since they have a network of tunnels, I'm going to put the live trap in various locations to catch the sneaky varmints.
My suggestion is: if you garden and discover that you are sharing your space with groundhogs, get deer fencing and a live trap and get them off of your property before they multiply!
