our maine home – zone 5b
Yesterday, from the hoophouse.
I’m happy with this year’s overwintered greens. Clockwise from lower left: Bloomsdale spinach, escarole, arugula, baby kale. And plenty of self-seeded claytonia.
We’ve been eating homegrown greens for a few weeks now. It’s amazing that they survive the cold winter nights (under row cover).
I planted these in mid-September. This year, the electric fence did its job and kept out voles.
Some photos from yesterday morning and then from yesterday’s snowshoe excursion on the Woods Trail starting behind the house.
After a few days of below freezing temperatures, we can still get greens from the hoophouse! Seems amazing.
Spinach, arugula, escarole, kale. And some baby claytonia.
I am appreciating these fall greens in the hoophouse. They are looking about the right size going into winter. No vole damage for a while now.
I spread more hay mulch today. The ground was too frozen to rake the raised beds in the fruit yard. Tomorrow I think I’ll have to harvest leeks. I’ve put it off too long. I also have to remove the asparagus stalks which have dried up and fallen over. And mulch those beds too.
We put up a short fence of hardware cloth all around the hoophouse. It’s buried in the ground about six inches. I don’t know if it will work, but can’t hurt. We lost a lot of greens last winter to voles.
Escarole, arugula, kale, spinach are planted in the beds. Ready to overwinter. The squash are in there curing.
I noticed the carrot tops looked significantly less bushy in the hoophouse bed. Sure enough, something had munched them down. And sampled some spinach and arugula as well. Rabbit or porcupine? Bigger than a vole, smaller than a deer. Possibly nocturnal.
This loss caused a reaction. First I harvested the carrots. A modest amount of short roots that will keep in the fridge for awhile.
Then Sam worked to put the hoophouse covers back on. Front, back, and sides. And semi-secured the edges to avoid more marauding pests. More work is needed to deter the voles that wrecked (ate) most of last winter’s greens.
The hoophouse has been uncovered for the season because we made a bet on warm, wet weather. We had plenty of rain. It was warm, but not the dreadful heatwave some parts of the US got. So the plants did okay. The tomatillos were especially happy. The basil also did well.
But the time comes to think about covering it up for the cold season growing. First step is to clean up the area. Lots of grass and weeds grow up around the edges. Things accumulate there, like wood, sticks, planks, plastic pots, cords, trays, watering cans…
We removed everything and Sam weedwhacked. He should be wearing safety glasses, but he was not. And got a scratched cornea as a result. Which necessitated a midnight visit to the emergency room with eye pain. It was not serious, luckily, and he anticipates a complete recovery.
We have had strong winds almost every day this spring. Maybe that’s the reason the zipper stitching pulled out of the front door of the hoophouse. With some encouragement from Sam, I decided to repair it with some hand stitching. It was challenging because, of course, it was windy when I worked on it.
The crops in the hoophouse suffered significantly from voles this year. The voles ate all the claytonia, spinach, lettuces, and whatever else I had planted – with the exception of kale and arugula. Not to their taste, I guess. So we had a meager crop of kale and arugula for our green supply this winter. We even had to supplement a little with purchased greens. But now the kale is lush and the arugula is going by.
Sam put an electric wire around the central beds, but we only found one dead vole. I don’t know if they left the scene for greener pastures or if the wire clicking scared them away. In any case, new baby greens are coming up undisturbed. And I’m using the heat of the sun during the day to baby my tomato seedlings and help germinate my parsley and peppers (at bottom of photo).
Eighty tomato seedlings – 8 cherries and 72 non-cherries of various varieties. The cherries include the delightfully named: Sunrise BumbleBee, Tropical Sunrise, and Principe Borghese. The most impressive of the non-cherry varieties so far are the Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye and the Italian Heirloom.
The seedlings are looking pretty sad and spindly at the moment. I just moved the tiny blocks into the larger blocks, which is a delicate operation. I’m counting on the natural vigor of tomatoes to make these guys want to grow!
I cleaned up the hoophouse today in anticipation of very cold temperatures tonight. Harvested some escarole and carrots. A white mold had eaten the tops of many carrots – maybe it cam in with the hay mulch? The roots seemed fine though. I’ll make a carrot soup and some escarole and beans.