Wow, it has been far too long since I’ve made a new posting. All of the computers in the house were broken for several months and our library (20 miles away) has a 30 minutes time limit per patron/per visit for internet usage. Unfortunately our twice a month trip to the library was barely enough computer-time to delete all the junk email from my inbox.
So, I deeply apologize for being completely out of touch for approx. 2 months or so there.
We’ve had a rather mild winter here in South Dakota once again. And I am wondering if we will have another drought summer with lots of grass- hoppers as we did last summer. (However, our tomatoes and peppers really seemed to enjoy the hot summer weather last year.) I say lots of grasshoppers, but of course it was NOTHING like the nearly Biblical Plague of Grasshoppers that Laura Ingalls Wilder describes in her book, On the Banks of Plum Creek… I can certainly be thankful for that.
We’ve started a few vegetable plants indoors already in our windowsills. Lettuce, Herbs and a few cherry-type tomatoes, all of which make good container garden plants. Toward the end of this month we will be getting the indoor mini greenhouse out of storage and setting up our grow lights and really getting busy starting our heirloom vegetable and flower transplants so they will be ready to set out in the garden this spring.
Varieties We plan to Grow in 2013: (Not a complete list, but a nice start of one.)
Beans: Gold Marie Vining (wax type pole bean), Royal Purple Pole, and Chinese Long Bean
Broccoli: Purple Sprouting and Romanesco
Carrots: Amarillo (yellow), Atomic Red (red), Cosmic Purple (purple), Snow White (white), plus an heirloom orange carrot
Cabbage: Red Express
Cauliflower: Cheddar, and both a green and a purple variety.
Celery: Red Re-Selection
Cucumbers: Dragon’s Egg, Boston Pickling, Uzebeski
Eggplant: Ping tung (very sweet elongated variety)
Popcorn: (the only corn we will grow this year) Dakota Black
Peppers: Lipstick, Chocolate Bell, Orange Bell, Yellow Bell, Red Bell, Green Bell, Mini Bell, Anaheim, Santa Fe, and Sweet Banana.
Pumpkins: Red Warty Thing, Cinderella, the pumpkin that looks like it’s covered in peanuts and a blue pie pumpkin that my grandmother always grew in Oregon.
Tomatoes: Black Prince (which we loved last year), Black Icicle, Orange Icicle, Green Zebra, Chocolate Cherry, Yellow Pear (which come up wild here every summer), Pink Caspian and Nature’s Riddle to name a few.
*Traditional garden center hybrids like Better Boy and Early Girl have never really done well for us here on this farm, but many of the heirlooms we’ve tried have done very nicely on our farm here. One notable exception to that was the “Mr. Stripey” plant I bought last year at the local big box store… it was the weirdest tomato plant I have every grown… huge plant with weird fuzzy leaves, lots of blossoms… but it never produced a single tomato fruit despite plenty of bees and other pollinators(I am sure that other people do fabulously with this variety… it just never did anything for us, making me wonder if it’s not adapted to the Southern US or something?)
We’ll probably grown a dozen or two others, but I can’t remember them all off the top of my head.
The Modern Pioneer Family 