Winter Garlic

One of our best selling items at the farmers market last summer was garlic.  Not the mild little generic garlic that you see in the supermarket.  But, garlic with names like Romainian Red, Persian Star and German Extra Hardy.  I'm not a garlic expert, but I can tell you that these are much more flavorful than the generic supermarket garlic.  The Romainian Red is a hot, pungent garlic that brought some of our customers back week after week for more.

Most people assume that you plant garlic in the spring, like onions and other vegetables.  But that is not the case.  In Oklahoma, garlic should be planted in October.  In fact, most seed companies will not even ship it to you until after September 1.  

We order most of our garlic from Filaree Farms.  They are located in Okanogan, WA, are organic certified and have a wide selection of different types and varieties of garlic.  They shipped our order to us the last week of September.  Planting garlic is pretty hard work, so Tom spread the work out over about a three week period devoting a couple of hours several times a week to planting garlic.  The garlic is shipped to you as "heads".  Heads consist of several "cloves".  You break the heads apart into the individual cloves and the cloves are what you plant.

After planting, it takes 2 to 3 weeks before the garlic sends leaves up through the soil seeking the light.  At that time, Tom mulches it with leaves or pine needles.  This year he planted oats between the rows as a winter cover crop.   Now that we've had several killing frosts, the garlic looks pretty sad.  See below.

The leaves have been nipped back pretty badly by the cold weather.  One would think that it is ruined.  However, once the weather warms up in the spring, this garlic will come to life and begin growing again. 

By June it will be ready for harvest.  You know it is ready to harvest when the tops begin to die.  It is a lot of fun and quite exciting to dig the garlic.  It seems like magic to see how one small clove has grown into a head of garlic that may be a couple of inches or more in diameter!

Leaf Mountain

We use a lot of leaves for mulching and for incorporating into our clay-based soil to add organic matter.   However, even though we have some large trees west of the house, most of the leaves that fall off them blow away.  Remember our name....Windy Acres!  Therefore, we have to get the leaves elsewhere. 

During the fall, Tom keeps an eye out for leaves that people set out for the trashmen and will pick them up and bring them home when he finds some.  Here is a picture of what we have accumulated so far in our "leaf bank".

I suspect that by spring this pile will be 2 - 3 times as big!

Thornless Cacti

We have moved most of our potted plants into the hoophouse for the winter.  Remember the hoophouse is our big unheated greenhouse.  We grow lettuce, spinach and other greens in it during the winter months.  These will survive the cold just fine in there......although, during the coldest part of the winter, they don't grow very much. 

Among the potted plants that we have moved in there this year are the rose bushes that I started from cuttings I took on Mother's Day weekend (see May 30th post) and some lilac bushes that I didn't get set out this fall.  But, the most interesting plants that are spending the winter in the hoophouse are some "thornless" cacti.  Here they are.

My son in the Dallas area is a math teacher, but he should have majored in horticulture because he has a flare for landscaping and growing things.  He is the one who told me how to root those rose cuttings and he is the one who came across these thornless cacti.  If you cut a pad off of a cactus, put it in a pot of dirt and don't water it too much, then it will grow into a large cactus, like the ones you see here.  Each of these started from ONE pad.

Our son gave us one of these thornless cacti several years ago and we set it out on the south side of our house when we lived in town.  It grew into a large cactus about 3 feet tall with many pads that have yellow flowers in the spring.  I was surprised that it survived the winters this far north, but it seemed to thrive in that location.

In this picture, it looks like it has thorns, but those are soft little "leaves" that grow on the new pads each year.  They fall off as the pads mature.

All of the cacti we have in the hoophouse are from the "mother" plant above.  We sell a few of these cacti at the farmers market, but I want to plant a few of them out here at the farm too.  I just have to figure out where to put them.  I'm not very good at landscaping......maybe I need to get my son to come up here and give me some advice!

Team Tag

I've talked about Lizzy a couple of times recently.  Lizzy is our beagle.  She loves to go outside and sniff all the new smells that have been deposited since the last time she "read" the yard.  Occasionally, Sally joins her on these excursions and they make a good "tag team"..... Lizzy doing most of the work and Sally standing back waiting and hoping for her to scare up a mouse or something.

A couple of weeks ago I caught them on camera during one of their "hunts". 

As I was watching the action here, I saw a small mouse run out of the grass and escape.  But, who was I to spoil their fun!  Just figured I would wait and see how long they would keep this up.  As it turned out, this went on for quite a while with Lizzy digging a hole.

 Sally helped some....just enough to get her nose dirty.

They never found the mouse, but they wore themselves out trying and had to take a long nap afterwards to regain their strength.

New Greenhouse

Ever since we moved from our house in town we have missed our little greenhouse in the back yard that was just a few steps from the house.  This summer Tom became acquainted with one of the Mennonite men who has a plant nursery and sells flowers and bedding plants at the Farmers Market.  This fellow also builds greenhouses and decks.  We went to look at a large greenhouse that one of the other farmers market vendors purchased from him and were very impressed.  We don't need one that large, but he builds smaller ones, too.

Tom stewed about buying one of the smaller ones all summer.  Finally, in October, he decided to use some of the money we've made this year from our Farmers Market endeavor to buy an 8X12 greenhouse.  Here's a picture of it.

We had them put it next to the house.  You cannot see very well, but there is about 2 feet between it and the house.  Notice that it is located so that we can walk into it from under the patio cover so in bad weather we won't get wet going to and from it.

You can't see the sliding door that leads out onto the patio from the house; nor can you see the patio itself. But, there is a strip of dirt between the patio and the greenhouse. We plan to build a deck to cover this area. We had this area covered by a conglomeration of mismatched paving stones and bricks. These were uneven and somewhat of a safety hazard!  I've been wanting to do something about this area ever since we moved here and am looking forward to finally making it into a nice enjoyable outdoor area.


Once the greenhouse was in place, we had a dump truck bring in a load of gravel and we put about 6 inches of gravel over the floor of the greenhouse.  This will keep it from getting muddy when we water plants and will also act as a "heat sink" to collect heat during the day and release it at night.

I was pretty impressed with the dump truck.  Guess I've never seen one up that close.  The guy in the picture is standing in the door of the truck while he is dumping the gravel so he can keep an eye on the electric lines above. 

More Wildlife

Our wildlife camera continues to amaze me with pictures of deer and other animals.  A couple of weeks ago we captured this picture of a herd of 5 deer eating the corn that Tom puts out for them.

The wildlife camera is motion activated and has an infrared flash so it does not scare the animals away.  All you see when it "flashes" is a red light on the camera itself.  Even with just this little bit of light, you can tell that most animals notice it and some of them look somewhat alarmed.  These deer, however, have been coming to eat the corn for several weeks now and seem to have become accustomed to it.

All of the deer in the above picture appear to be female or else too young to have antlers.  And, I've been wondering why we have not seen any bucks . . . UNTIL this week when the camera captured a picture of this big guy.

Isn't he magnificent!  It is hard to believe that all these deer come to eat just a few yards from the house every night.

The little coyote that I wrote about on October 25 has not been back and we've not seen any pictures of raccoons this year.  Last winter we had lots of pictures of raccoons.  So, I'm wondering where they are hanging out this year.  However, we did get a picture of one animal that we've not seen before.  See below.

No, not the deer....the little black and white animal to the right of the deer.  It's a skunk!

Compost Dog

Lizzy is our beagle.  We don't know how old she is because she was a stray that we found running around our neighborhood in town in 2004.  She was a grown dog, perhaps 4-5 years old at the time.   So, she  is probably at least 10. 

Beagles are hounds and were bred to be hunting dogs to sniff out small animals.  We had never had a hound as a pet before we got Lizzy and I'll have to tell you that they are a different kind of dog.  For one thing, they have the "melodious voice of the hound" as I read in one book.  Lizzy doesn't just bark; she bays.  But the main difference between hounds and other kinds of dogs is their sense of smell is so much more acute.  In fact, Lizzy's nose rules her whole being.  Sally, our other dog, can be allowed outside and will rarely venture off our 5 acres.  But, we can't do that with Lizzy.  She has to be on a leash or watched very carefully because she might catch the scent of a rabbit or other small animal and be gone in a matter of seconds.

Lizzy loves to explore our compost pile.  We have a small compost pile near my herb garden where we put our kitchen waste, weeds we pull out of the beds and things like that.  But we found that we had way too much composting matter for the small one.  So, we decided to pile all this stuff out in the field where we could turn it with the tractor. 

Here are some pictures of Lizzy investigating the compost pile.