Double Header: Garden Notes and Baby Goats

I reckon I'd better start with the baby goats. :) 

Of my two pregnant does, Saluda was first. Last Wednesday she wasn't behaving like herself, so I penned her up before lunch. It was a good thing because right after lunch Dan went out while I did the dishes. He was back in a couple of minutes to tell me the first one was already on the ground. The second (the little doe) was out about 15 minutes after I got there.

About an hour old. The gray is a little buck, the brown is a little girl.

One day old

Buckling

Doeling

These are Saluda's first and she took right to mothering.

Garden Notes: March 2025

Rainfall

• 5th: 0.55"
• 10th: 0.77"
• 16th: 0.7"
• 20th: sprinkle
• 24th: 0.03"
• 30th: 0.55"
• 31st: 0.63"
• Total: 3.23 inches

 Temperature

• range of nighttime lows: 28 to 63°F (-2 to 17°C)
• range of daytime highs: 51 to 79°F (11 to 26°C)

Planted

• daikons
• turnips
• lettuce
• parsnips
• carrots
• beets
• sweet pepper starts
• cucumber starts
• fig trees
• herb starter tray
• parsley
• dill
• comfrey
• gravel root
• red poppy
• sweet basil

Harvested

• lettuce
• chickweed
• wild lettuce
• chicory greens
• kale
• collards
• broccoli
• dandelion greens
• asparagus

Photos

The greenhouse gets quite warm on mild days, so the only
things I've got in it now are tomato seedlings & bolting lettuce.

My potted kale, collards, and new lettuce have been moved outside where
they don't mind light frost but don't like how warm the greenhouse gets.

My fall lettuce is bolting, but I planted new containers of mixed lettuces which are thriving. 

Also left in the greenhouse is my 2-year-old broccoli plant. It still
produces enough broccoli bites for salads, plus I'll save some seed.

In the garden, the mustard in the kale & collards bed is flowering.

Snow peas and garlic.

In the foreground is our hugelkultur mound. It's loaded with clover, daffodils,
chicory, and Egyptian walking onions. Behind to the right is our wheat patch.

Pear blossoms

Apple blossoms

That's it for me. Anything going on in your garden?

Double Header: Garden Notes and Baby Goats 

© March 2025 by Leigh at https://www.5acresandadream.com

Garden Notes: October 2024

Rainfall

• 30th: 0.04"
• Total: 0.04 inches

 Temperature

• range of nighttime lows: 34 to 64°F (1 to 18°C)
• range of daytime highs: 57 to 85°F (14 to 30°C)

Weather Notes

• The week following Helene was hot, then the temps gradually dropped to pleasantly mild to chilly
• First frost was early: Oct. 17th. But it was scattered so that we lost the winter squash in the garden, but those growing in the pasture survived. Most of our cherry tomatoes made it, but our neighbor's field of kudzu was frost killed. 

Garden Notes

• I put several blankets over my sweet pepper plants when frost was expected and they made it without damage.
• Deer devastated the sweet potatoes in the front yard keyhole garden and the bed of okra growing in the front yard. I was saving some nice pods for seeds, but they got eaten! Then I remembered that I still had some Deer-B-Gone, and that saved everything. The okra is still struggling, but at least I'll get some good pods for seed.
• Doing lots of irrigating of the fall garden from our rainwater collection system.

Planted

• parsnips
• lambs quarter
• garlic

Transplanted

• lettuce
• kale

Harvested

• winter squash
• sweet potatoes
• green tomatoes
• green peppers
• cherry tomatoes
• green beans
• greens: dandelion, kale, turnip, daikon, chicory, chickweed
• yamberries
• walking onions
• asparagus

Preserved

• green beans and yamberries, canned
• persimmons, frozen

To-do

• finish getting everything mulched
• water as needed
• pray for rain

Pictures

I harvested the remaining peppers before the frost, then covered
the two plants well. They survived and are producing more.

My frost protection obviously worked, because we have more peppers coming on.

The persimmon tree that Helene knocked over was loaded with persimmons. Persimmons are very astringent, but said to sweeten with frost. Ours are always ripened and dropped before that, so I rarely pay attention to them. Plus, being such a tall tree, there are only smashed ones on the ground anyway. Dan tasted one from the fallen tree and thought it was good. So I collected the soft, translucent skinned ones.

Over the course of a week, I managed to collect 2 gallons of ripe persimmons.

I wondered if freezing them would help, so I made a batch of persimmon puree and popped it into the freezer. I made persimmon pancakes the following Sunday and they were delicious. I've managed to collect two gallons of them, and will make persimmon jam sometime this winter to can.

sweet basil managed to avoid the frost

oven roasted okra and green tomatoes

Roasting the green tomatoes was an experiment that turned out well. Most of my tomato plants were pulled earlier in the month, because by the the time they ripen, they're not so good inside. But green, they're fine. We like fried green tomatoes, but they're a lot of fuss to make. Chopping and roasting them in the oven is just of good, but quicker and easier and with less oil!

Green bean harvest decreased early in the month, so I tried canning some with
yamberries. Green beans with baby potatoes is tasty, so this should be good too.

Finally filling the African keyhole garden with soil and compost.

When Dan build our second African keyhole garden, it was already growing volunteer cherry tomatoes and lambs quarter. We harvested these all summer and I waited to fill the bed. That's been one of my garden project this month, layering the soil with rotted wood, compost, and woodchips. I'm guessing we'll get more volunteer tomatoes and lambs quarter next summer, which if fine. 

sweet potato squash

daikons with irrigation pipe

Kale. This has been tasty in salads.

lettuce and carrots

lettuce transplanted into large pots

The lettuce and kale are growing so well that I've thinned them out and transplanted some into gallon-size containers. These will be moved into the greenhouse when it gets a bit cooler. 

Anybody else still got a garden going on?

Garden Notes: October 2024 © October 2024

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com

Garden Notes: January 2024

Rainfall

• 6th: 1.29"
• 9th: 4.35"
• 12th: 0.89"
• 16th: 0.14"
• 23rd: 0.04"
• 24th: 0.26"
• 25th: 1.68"
• 26th: 0.11"
• 27th: 1.93"
• 31st: 0.07"
• Total: 10.76 inches

Temperature

• range of nighttime lows: 10 to 60°F (-12 to 15°C)
• range of daytime highs: 40 to 71°F (4 to 21°C)

Weather Notes

• Warm temps coincide with rainy days, cold temps with clear weather.
• What the temps don't reflect is the wind, which has been blustery and bitter. Even on mild days it's often not appealing to work outside. 

Garden Notes

• It's too cold for things to grow, so after finishing up mulching the beds, I've been working on the weediest aisles, scraping the weeds and old mulch. Then I put down a new layer of cardboard and fresh wood chips. Not sure if I'll finish the entire garden, but I like working there on nice days.
• Other than that . . .

Jan. 7th: we ate the last of our 2023 fall tomatoes. I saved the seed.

Greenhouse Notes

• 12 outside, 25 in the greenhouse
• 31 and sunny outside, 74 in the greenhouse
• One thing that's really thriving in the greenhouse is the volunteer chickweed.

Chickweed in the front pot. broccoli behind.

Temporary growing table with kale and lettuce.

Harvested

• lettuce
• turnips
• Jerusalem artichokes

Greenhouse lettuce. Not enough for  salads, but enough for our Sunday burgers.

Nicely sized sunchokes from a patch I didn't dig last winter.

Pantry salad: canned green beans, cherry tomatoes preserved in olive oil and
vinegar, and black olives. The oil and vinegar from the tomatoes is the dressing.

Transplanted

• thyme
• lambs ear
• echinacea

The goal with the transplanting to to disassemble one of my front yard herb beds. While I really like having it, there's a battle every year to keep the wire grass at bay. That and the dozens of acorn seedlings that come with the wood chip mulch. Neither is conducive for the easy growing of perennials. We will likely try some annuals in the bed next summer.

That wraps up our January. How about you?

Garden Notes: January 2024 © January 2024

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com

Wicking Pots

I'm always on the look-out for ideas to conserve water. I've been happy with my ollas, and here is another nifty idea, wicking pots. Container plants usually need a lot of watering, and I find them difficult to keep properly hydrated. The wicking pot solves those problems. The idea is to create a water reservoir in the bottom of a pot. This allows for watering from the bottom with no evaporation loss. An air space above the reservoir keeps the roots from growing into the water and drowning the plant.  Here's how I made ours.

Pots and perforated drainage pipe.

Anything with no drainage holes can be used as a pot. I chose something fairly decorative, since these are going on the front porch. 5-gallon buckets are common, as are 55-gallon drums cut in half to make two containers. It needs to hold water in the bottom, so anything without drainage holes will work. The perforated drainage pipe will create the water reservoir and air space. Any kind of pipe could be used, or plastic bottles. They just need a diameter of 4 to 6 inches. 

Each pot also needs...

Watering tube.

It should be long enough to stick out of the pot, and a diameter so that a garden hose can be used to fill the pot. 1.5 to 2 inch PVC works well, with the bottom cut at an angle.This will keep it from sitting flat on the bottom of the pot and preventing water from filling the reservoir. 

Pot with drainage pipe and watering tube.

The next step is to drill a drainage hole. It needs to be one inch below the top of the drainage pipe. This will create the necessary air space and keep water from flooding the pot. 

Drilling the drainage hole.

Next, is to add a barrier to keep the soil out of the water reservoir. Most people use some sort of landscape cloth, but cotton fabric or old cotton t-shirt fabric can be used.

I used landscape cloth.

Then the pots are filled with soil.

The fabric is fitted around the contour of the drainage pipe, so some of the soil is in contact with the water.

I placed these wicking pots on either side of the front porch steps. The slabs were from pillars on the original front porch, which were torn down. Dan added the trellises when he finished rebuilding it.

Ready to plant.

We want the pots to contain vining plants that will look pretty and help shade the front porch. 

Wicking pots containing transplanted Matt's Wild Cherry Tomatoes.

From what people say, wicking pots only need to be watered once a week. Sounds like an excellent kind of container gardening, doesn't it?

Wicking Pots © June 2021 by Leigh 

at http://www.5acresandadream.com

Ollas Revisited

We're having an early summer April; one where many days already pop up into the lower 80sF (upper 20sC). A week of hot days like that with no rain remind me of how quickly things dry out. So one of my April gardening projects is to install more ollas. 

Potted tree collard with olla.

I first blogged about ollas last summer (Conserving Water in the Garden: The Olla). It's an idea I found in a book that I really like, Gardening with Less Water: Low-Tech, Low-Cost Techniques; Use up to 90% Less Water in Your Garden by David A. Bainbridge. A simple olla (oy' ya) can be made by plugging the hole in a terra cotta pot, sinking it in a garden bed, and keeping it filled with water. Water gradually wicks out and does a great job of keeping things from wilting. For my potted tree collard (above), I decided to try a different design.

I took two pots, plugged the hole in the bottom of one, then inverted the other and glued it as a top half to the olla. When I transplanted my tree collard, I put both it and the new olla into a larger pot. The olla is sunk so that only the top shows. An inverted terra cotter saucer serves as a lid to keep mosquitoes out.

The crimson clover & vetch are nitrogen-fixing volunteers.

It's narrower, so it fits better in the large pot, but holds more water than a single.

Easy to add water.

Next up is a several more for the raised beds in my hoop house.

Those raised beds tend to dry out quickly in hot weather, so hopefully these will help. 

How about you? Is your weather nice enough to work in your garden?

Ollas Revisited © April 2021 by Leigh

at http://www.5acresandadream.com

Conserving Water in the Garden: Inverted Bottles

Here's another idea for conserving water in the garden - an inverted bottle waterer. I'm trying it in my African keyhole garden, because the blazing afternoon sun with no rain has been unkind to the borage and lettuce growing in it.

Jericho lettuce seems to beat the heat! Borage behind it.

I got the idea from Liz at Eight Acres, and she got the idea from someone else, and I hope you'll try it and pass it on too! Idea sharing is what makes the internet useful.

Yes, you can use plastic bottles, although Liz's experiments favored glass to plastic because plastic bottles tend to suck in as the water empties. Plus, she found the glass bottles held water longer. Even so, I'm willing to see for myself. I don't buy bottled water or soda, so we rarely have plastic bottles, but I had one that contained seltzer water (mixed with fruit juice concentrate for a yummy sugar-free soda pop), So I'm using it to experiment in  my large back porch planter.

Originally, I planted lettuce in this pot, but violets took over. They're
a good test subject because they wilt quickly when the pot dries out.

I suspect longevity will depend on the quality of the plastic. Many water bottles these days are extremely flimsy and I doubt would last long. Even so, all plastic eventually dries out and cracks.

Punching a small hole in the cap will slow the emptying of the bottle.

Actually, we rarely have glass bottles either, but I think they will last longer than plastic. This seems the absolute best way to recycle them!

Watering a sweet potato plant. This one is thriving
compared to the sweet potato plants in the garden.

An observation—the smaller (12 oz) bottle empties as soon as I put it in the ground. But the sweet potato is thriving, so I won't complain. The larger (750 ml) bottle delivers slowly. It was empty about 24 hours later. Both of these have made a wonderful difference for those poor plants.

Like the olla, this idea certainly makes watering easier and more effective. With both, water is delivered directly to the roots, so there is no surface water loss through evaporation. Compared to the olla, the bottles are quicker and easier to install; no digging required. That would make them preferable for perennials or other plants with established root systems. It would also be great for potted plants, which always dry out too quickly. On the other hand, the olla holds more water.

Be sure to read the comments as folks are sharing a lot more good ideas. I'm definitely going to expand on all of them!

Conserving Water in the Garden: Inverted Glass Bottles 
© July 2020 by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com