I had the hydro units going. I have 3 American Hydro (Arcata, CA) economy units, each one giving me 18 square feet of growing space. I have a 2′ x 3′ tray setup from Foothill Hydroponics (Los Angeles) that I can use as a flowing stream or an ebb and flow unit.  I have a nice 8-pot Dutch Bucket System from General Hydroponics (Sebastopol, CA) which I *really* like.  In the flowing tray I grew a nice crop of watercress. It did so well the roots clogged the draining ability up and it lost water from dripping off one side. In the econo trays I grew lettuce mix, mesclun, and basil. The basil does real well here in hydro, but I have to wait to plant it until the weather really warms up. In the Dutch bucket system I grew cutting celery, for it’s spicy leaves, and regular stem celery, preferably a gourmet variety that stays tender like “Tango”, and doesn’t need blanching.

I got a lovely crop of winter squash. Large ones like Jarrahdale, Victor Hubbard, Galueax d’Esynnes, and more. the Lakota did not come true to type at all.

I had a good crop of hops from the two year old plants. We planted 4 new hops varieties, too, last Spring. they did okay and began to grow well.

We did get some snow and snap peas.

During the time the tomato plants were bearing and trying to ripen fruits, we had rainy humid weather that caused a lot of fruit to rot and not ripen. Heirloom tomato varieties have thinner, more tender skins, than today’s modern hybrids bred for shipping.  But we did get some fruit to ripen indoors when picked green-ripe.

We had a good harvest of garlic. I always go to Heritage Farm, north of Decorah, home of the Seed Savers Exchange, and buy heirloom garlic heads on sale, the last week of October. I have about 2 weeks after that to get the kitchen garden cleared, manured, tilled and planted with the cloves of garlic. then the ground freezes. The garlic has to be mulched with about a foot of straw to keep it from freezing dead here. It goes as low as -25 degrees here each Winter.

We had plenty of herbs to use in cooking from the kitchen garden on the South side of the house.  Sage, oregano, marjoram, mint, and catnip, cilantro, dill, and fennel. The perennial herbs also get mulched with a foot of straw. The 2 tea rose bushes get cut back and mulched very heavily.

The flowers in the bed in the front yard did very well, too. I planted 2 pink early lilacs in the center of the bed, and perennial flowers around them. Amazingly, the snapdragons are perennial here, too, like they were in NorCal. With a mulch! I grew all the flowers from seed.

Last season we had a huge harvest from the garden, but the weeds got away from us and made the garden look ugly. We also ran out of time and energy getting things planted on time while doing other homesteading things, as well.

We are beginning the season earlier this year, and we have corrected the things that caused problems with seed germination in our first season here, last Spring. We won’t be late planting some things out this year! We also have adult son and daughter working along side us this year.

We planted 4 flats yesterday of cabbages, broccoli and cauliflower, along with the tomatoes and some of the peppers. We will finish planting today with a few more flats.

The tom and pepper flats are upstairs on a heat mat where they will be quite warm, and the cole crops are in the basement on heat mats at about 7o degrees.

I am using Black Gold CoCo Blend and Fox farm Seedling Mix for planting this year, after using the awful bagged soil locally available. The cost of the better potting soil is well worth it in my book.

More to come! Come back to visit during the year!

Here are my petunias, growing in pots around the kitchen garden and hydro units.

Yes, we have some weed problems, but we are dealing with them. We are mulching with hay, and hand weeding.

First off, we decided to move to rural NE Iowa. We found an old farmhouse we liked and that was it. It took all summer to move all the farm stuff and household goods, so we had no garden in 2008, other than donating our seedlings to our former community garden.

We got to Iowa by late July. I had been diagnosed with a serious medical problem and so the Fall was taken up with that, and with getting ready for Winter.

In November 2008 we got a huge space plowed up.

In Spring 2009 we enlarged it to half an acre, and had it manured and disked by a farmer neighbor. Then we rented a tiller for our tractor and went over it 4 times. We had the soil tested and added sulphur and nitrogen. The soil is very good here, great corn land, top-rated.

So far I have planted onions, garlic, and potatoes. Am trying to get the peas and carrots and beets in now. Will take pics today once the light improves.

The gene known as SUN, the second ever found to play a key role in the formation of elongated tomato varieties, could provide vital new insight into how edible plants develop, said Esther van der Knaap, lead researcher of the study published in the journal Science.

Tomatoes, among the most varied crops in terms of size and shape, evolved from a small, round ancestral wild fruit to the many varieties grown today. But little is known about the genetic principles for such transformations in tomatoes or other fruits and vegetables.

“Tomatoes are the model in this emerging field of fruit morphology studies,” said van der Knaap, an assistant professor of horticulture and crop science at Ohio State University.

“We are trying to understand what kind of genes caused the enormous increase in fruit size and variation in fruit shape as tomatoes were domesticated,” she added.

“Once we know all the genes that were selected during that process, we will be able to piece together how domestication shaped the tomato fruit — and gain a better understanding of what controls the shape of other very diverse crops, such as peppers, cucumbers and gourds.”

She also said that SUN, which takes its name from the oval shaped and pointy “SUN 1642″ tomato variety in which the gene was found, does not show exactly how the fruit-shape phenotype gets changed.

“But what we do know is that turning the gene on is very critical to result in elongated fruit,” she said.

The objective now, van ker Knaap said, is to determine whether the same gene, or one closely related, controls morphology in other fruit and vegetable crops.

The SUN gene affects fruit shape after pollination and fertilization, whereas the only other fruit-shape gene previously identified — known as OVATE — affects the shape of fruit before flowering, the report said.

In August we harvested 100 pounds of tomatoes in one morning and we canned 70 quarts of tomato soup from them over 2 following days.  We canned chutneys, sauces, pickles, and preserves. From around the garden and our from our back yard we harvested chestnuts, peaches, apricots, apples, grapes, and figs, and walnuts.

All in all it was a very successful season and we look forward to next year!

The tomatoes are over 5.5 feet tall now, and they have outgrown the cages due to my inattendance at times to cage training.  The plants are impressive and tremendous. They are loaded with fruit.

The rows are actually 45 feet long, so there are even more of them there than I thought. Especially the bush beans. I am harvesting the bush beans right now, and the pole beans that I’m not saving for seed. I am canning them today. So many shapes and colors!

And the summer squash! Wow! What a performance those plants are putting out. I’m baking lots of zuke bread and freezing it. Some bigger ones that escaped our notice until too late are going to the chooks.

We are having some irrigation problems with algae, even with filters in line. It clogs up the T-tape holes.  Have to flush the lines repeatedly to try and help it along.  I wish I had more, but I can’t keep up with weeding what I have.

Am going to start planning for next year while ideas and notes are fresh in my head from this year right now.