The Crystal Coast, Salt water on my feet

Preparing for the Storm

When a hurricane misses an area, there is always a collective sigh of relief.

When one actually pays a visit there is lots of extra work and some lessons to be learned.

Certainly Cape Carteret and the beaches of Emerald Isle  have survived many storms including Irene which is when I first started writing this article back in August 2010.   

The worst I saw from Irene  was the shed roof peeled off at Winberry’s produce. I know many in the area were ready for even more than the lengthy beating that Irene gave us. Still these pictures and the YouTube I share at end show that a storm like Irene is not to be ignored.

However, Florence, eight years later, was a different story.  Many people lost their homes from Florence.  We lost a few pieces of soffit and a few cardboard boxes that were on the floor of our garage. Over fifteen years Florence was the only storm to even put a few inches of water on our garage floor. Our house was seven feet above the garage floor. I say was because in 2021 we moved inland to be closer to our grandchildren.

Irene was our first serious hurricane in our first five years that my wife and I have lived along the Southern Outer Banks. While we had a hurricane emergency kit almost from day one on the coast, its evolution to something much more sophisticated had only begun when Irene came ashore near Cape Lookout on Saturday, August 27.

There was nothing magic in those early preparations for Irene, mostly we used common sense and listened to the experts some of whom had been on the shore for their whole lives.  By the time Florence hit on September 11, 2018, we were really prepared but even so we followed the mandatory evacuation orders. Most I talked who did not evacuate were sorry they didn’t.

This list is in not particular order does not replace common sense. I can tell you that hurricanes love to hit at night.  There is nothing scarier than being in the dark during a hurricane so the top of my list is light.

Over the years we gathered a couple of LED battery powered lanterns and a number of very compact LED flashlights. These emergency lights are the first level of defense to make sure the lack of power does not end up being any worse  than it is normally.  Over time we added power bricks for our phones, small rechargeable light.  After our move from the coast we got a rechargeable power station that will run both our refrigerator and Internet service.  Likely the power station is a response to us leaving our generator at the coast.

Part of additions to our emergency kit before we left the coast was a fancy emergency radio from Amazon. It can be powered with anything from a hand crank to solar.   It supplements our battery powered transistor radio.  Not surprisingly power outages happen even away from the coast.

Next on our important items  list are a couple of coolers- one big, one not so big.  It takes forty pounds of ice to completely fill both coolers. In the case of Irene, I loaded them with ice on Friday afternoon before Irene arrived. The automatic ice machine in Peletier had a large line so I drove across the bridge and got my ice in Emerald Isle just before they closed the bridge because of their evacuation order. That gave me a chance to go take a few pictures of the Bogue Inlet Pier as the first big waves were hitting it.

When the power started flickering on Saturday morning, we took items out of the refrigerator that we planned to use in the few meals and put them in the small cooler.  It is probably no surprise to those who know me, but even back in 2010 we kept a small emergency plastic container of Duke’s mayonnaise.

The big cooler stays closed as a reserve for ice. Even after over 48 hours it still had over 75% of its ice on Monday morning long after Irene.  We were lucky during Irene.  The power went off just before midnight and was off for less than four hours.

We always tried to cook some easy to prepare protein for sandwiches the day before a hurricane is schedule to visit. We also stock up on tuna fish, peanut butter, and bread to go with the canned soup, salmon, and chicken that is usually on hand. Paper plates and cups along with plastic utensils and a fresh box of large garbage bags make life a lot easier after a storm especially if the power is out for an extended period of time.

We have always installed our grills to get  fuel from the large propane tank that feeds our fireplace and other appliances. If the power stays out, you cook on the gas grill unless you run the generator which in our case allowed us to use our gas stove.  If you don’t have a gas grill, get something easier than a charcoal grill.   You can have storms that bring extended rain.  A single burner propane cooking stove can make life easier than trying to get a charcoal grill going.

In addition to food, a stockpile of water is critical. We try to keep at least two flats of bottled water on hand all the time. After Irene, we bought from Amazon a six gallon drinking-water-safe water container.  Whenever a storm was close enough to make us feel uncomfortable, we would fill a few one gallon jugs that we had around. We also bought a dozen small bottles of water in case we had to leave by car. We planned to have over ten gallons of water for the two of us. Filling our bathtub with water before a storm was another regular step. You might need water to flush toilets.   Keeping buckets ready to fill whenever a situation looks like it was going from bad to worse is important. In our later years at the coast, we even added some water purification tools and food safe bags that could be used with five gallon plastic buckets.

An important step in storm preparation is to secure any important personal papers- passports, birth certificates, papers for insurance, banks, and loans.  We have two quick-exit, emergency brief cases and a backpack that carries four laptops. We also have a camera bag for three cameras, various chargers and USB thumb drives/portable SSD drives.  The quick exit strategy also includes at least $400 in cash.

When Irene came, we had a freezer full of frozen homegrown tomatoes, and packed with meat. We decided to buy a Troy-Bilt generator. We got one from  Lowe’s well before the storm so there were still lots of choices.  We used our generator a little over three hours with Irene.  In the eleven years after that, it was never used for a power outage.  However, I had to start it at least twice a year and keep lots of ethanol-free fuel around for it.

With the generator, you need spare gas cans.  We ended up with three five gallon cans.  That gave us enough ethanol free gas  to run the generator sporadically for four or five days without siphoning gas from the boat or truck. Our generator performed perfectly. It always started on the first pull but I always turned the fuel shut off valve and ran the generator until there was no gas in the carburetor to create a mess.  I also used fuel stabilizer.

For the Irene emergency, I wired a couple of circuits so that we had the refrigerator, lights, coffee, and a toaster oven.  Well before hurricane Florence arrived, we had installed a proper external plug for the generator and the proper switch with lock out to go from the power grid to the generator.  We could have had emergency electricity for a long time with just the boat gas.  I eventually added a battery powered pump that would have allowed me to easily access our boat’s gas.

Make no mistake, a generator is a lot of work.  If it is going to get really bad, you are likely better off getting out of town.  When it does get really bad, you might have power, but there are likely no other services including doctors.

We also kept a large rechargeable spotlight since we lived along the water, and it could be possible we needed to figure out how high the water had risen during the night.  Obviously we also stockpiled batteries of all sizes.

Our homes have probably always had  a little more than the normal first aid supplies that most homes have.  We lived on an isolated farm for ten years, it shaped our preparedness well before hurricanes. Being boaters we also had at our disposal  the emergency gear for our boat which included a larger first aid kit, flares, emergency marine radio, and emergency noise makers.

It is absolutely critical to not  forget to get cash from the ATMs while the power is there. When the first restaurants come back, sometimes they will only take cash.  It is important to check on your supply of medicines, fill your vehicles with gasoline, and make sure that all of your bills which might come due during the storm are paid ahead of time.

Actual preparations at the house involved bringing inside any items that might blow or float away and using bungee cords to secure heavy deck furniture to the deck railings.  You would be surprised what can float in a hurricane surge.

For us the final thing was to put our boat on storm footing. We had a side pole lift which doesn’t have the boat suspended from cables or slings. Our skiff sat on two metal arms. Sixteen years of experience, including Irene and Floyd demonstrated that our boat was safer on this kind of lift than on a trailer.

All our planning made us feel lots better but it never got bad enough for us to use all our gear.  Still I think it was well worth being thoroughly prepared for all the storms even if you like us end up leaving for a bad one like Florence. Solid preparations mean the next time around is usually a snap and if you are caught off guard, you still close to being prepared

You alway hope you don’t have to go on full alert status.  However, Mother Nature is truly unpredictable, so do whatever you have to do in order to stay safe which includes leaving when told to do so.

If you want to get a taste of the rains and winds that we experienced for hours, check out this YouTube video that I did during the height of Irene.  The only pictures I have of Florence are the aftermath which you can find in this post.  One last piece of advice, be cognizant of how the storm interacts with evacuation routes.  There are often times when flooding is worse inland than one the coast. More than one long time resident told me to watch the rivers if I evacuated because the window to get back to coast was often short.  Inland flooding often was much worse and lasted longer than coastal flooding.  We barely got back to the coast before the roads closed after Florence.

Finding a home by the water

Bogue Sound - Looking East

Finding your spot on the water is not as simple as it might first appear.

Our journey to a home by the water involved a lot of learning and more than a few surprises. After finding our home on the water, it turned out that the fishing, beaches, boating, and kayaking we sought were just part of what made us fall in love with our new home and the surrounding area.

Even with a history of living close to nature, we were surprised that our home was in the middle of such an amazing natural paradise that brought almost daily surprises into our lives. The egrets, great blue herons, and other birds became regular visitors from the beginning.

After years of nearly daily contact, we are no longer surprised to see a great egret working the marsh grass by our dock. Fifteen years ago when we started looking for a home on the water, we did not really know what we wanted in a waterfront home.

Deciding on moving to the warmth of the coast dictated that where to live on the water would be more complicated than we supposed. In most of the country, you live on a lake or a river. Here we could live on the beach, on the Intracoastal Waterway, in an inlet, on a big coastal river, or in the marshes just off a river. On top of that some marshes are kayak accessible and others can be reached by boat or kayak. Then there are places that can reached only by skiff and others by deep water boats. Some lots can have lifts for boats and in other places lifts are not allowed. There is lots of water on the coast but water is complicated on the coast.

We looked for two years from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Southport, North Carolina. In 2006, we decided on North Carolina's Crystal Coast and eventually the western side of Carteret County. There we found fifteen-minute access to beautiful beaches, good fishing, warm weather for at least ten months of the year, and traffic that only clogs up on the bridge to the beaches a few times for a couple hours on Saturday or Sunday during beach season. We also found a wealth of services, places to eat or entertain ourselves, and friendly people. Of course we got our water in the backyard, friendly both to kayaks and our skiff which rests on a side pole lift.

We ended up in the marshes along Raymond's Gut which flows into the wide (almost two miles across where we are), tidal White Oak River. Our Charleston-style home is eight minutes to ten minutes from Cape Carteret where we have most of the services we need including some restaurants, Walgreen's, a Lowe's grocery store, lots of banks, a Lowe's Home Improvement Store, some local churches, a very good vet, lots of fast food and the excellent White Oak Elementary school. Adjoining Cedar Point adds more services including a Bojangles for a evening or morning biscuit, Cedar Point Tire, a great independent garage that does all our car service and a couple of open-air farmers' markets reminiscent of the ones from our days in Nova Scotia. Clyde Phillips Seafood, one of the last old time seafood markets and its fresh-from-the-sea shrimp and fish is only another five minutes away. There's even a new Walmart on the far side of Swansboro only about fifteen minutes from our little piece of paradise.

When we bought we did not appreciate the importance of the marshes both outside and inside of Raymond's Gut. Marshes help make the area a safe place to weather the storms that sometimes visit the area. We stayed in our home for the Category 3 Hurricane Irene. Power was out only for three hours. We have left the area just once during the county-wide mandatory evacuation for Hurricane Florence. Even then we came home to find only a loose piece of vinyl and a few pieces of soffit to replace. My skiff was still on the lift unharmed as it has always been during storms along the coast. The butter in our fridge had not even melted.

Now in our fourteenth year since the move, I can say that our location turned out to be better than we hoped it to be. Our small subdivision on the White Oak River is three miles or so up river from Swansboro which happens to be on the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). It takes about ten minutes by boat to get to the ICW and another ten or so to make it out Bogue Inlet to the Atlantic Ocean. There I have had fishing trips that I only dreamed of before. I have caught bluefish outside Bogue Inlet until my arms ached. In my kayak I have brought home numerous flounder, trout, and red drum after fishing within sight of our home. At times I have caught a fish in the river, cleaned it on our dock, and cooked the fish in our kitchen all within forty minutes and that includes the ten-minute paddle back home.

We have watched as services in the area have improved since our move here. I work at home and my Internet connection has gone from barely acceptable to 472 Mbps down and 22.7 Mbps up, plenty of speed for me and for streaming content. There is now a medical services building in Cedar Point which has eliminated many trips to Morehead City. We have gone from one drug store on Emerald Isle to four within ten minutes of us. The new Publix on Emerald Isle has been a real treat and the expanded library just minutes from our house has become a regular stop. Having Morehead City's shopping, hospital and restaurants just twenty minutes away has also added to our enjoyment of the area. Serious traffic is still mostly non-existent. Any shopping besides Trader Joe's and Costco can be found in Jacksonville (with lots more traffic to go with it) thirty minutes away. We get our Trader Joe's fix by going to Wilmington (serious traffic) every few months.

One of the great things about having a home on the coast is that you get regular visitors. We have never been at a loss for what to do with visitors here. It is an easy trip to the beaches. From young grandchildren to older relatives, we have never had a problem finding a beach spot to wow our visitors or an easy trail to hike. Most visitors get a visit to Beaufort which is only thirty minutes away or if their time is short we enjoy the cute shops on Front Street in nearby Swansboro. Once you throw in a boat ride sometimes with fishing and a meal of fresh seafood, you end up with a perfectly executed visit. Sometimes we get special visitors like Frank 29X, the Great Egret, who has been dropping by for the last several years. This picture of Frank near our home gives you a good perspective of the water in our area.

In our everyday life, we have also greatly enjoyed living here on Raymond's Gut. There is nothing like a view of the water from your desk to keep work from taking over your life. This has been a wonderful place for our grandchildren to visit. I taught our granddaughter to swim like a fish in the neighborhood pool which is in the cul de sac with our home and often empty of swimmers early in the early morning. The quiet roads in the subdivision have been a great place to walk or bike. Longer trails are just a few miles away in the Croatan National Forest access in Cedar Point. My morning routine usually includes a walk around the boardwalk which adjoins our home and surrounds our clubhouse and pool complex. In previous years when I wasn't working so hard, I would often take off in our skiff and go fishing in the marshes near Swansboro. It was not unusual to be back and ready for work as my wife was having her morning coffee. I have also been known to take a mid-day break from work and take my kayak out to catch fish for lunch.

My wife has especially enjoyed the privacy we have at the back of our house where we garden. We grow lettuce, broccoli, onions, beans, cucumbers, peppers, and of course tomatoes. We have a fall and spring crop of some vegetables. Sometimes the flowers take over like this year when her zinnias grew almost as tall as my wife and turned one of our raised beds into a paradise for butterflies. As a writer, this home and my recently added upstairs office have been the best place I have ever had for writing. It is hard to complain but easy to get inspired and focused when you have great views of the water.

It turns out that if you find the right spot, life on the water can be more than a sum of its parts. It is with more than a little reluctance as we head off to our next adventure to be part of our too-distant grandchildren's lives that we offer up our home, pictured here and listed here on Zillow to the next family looking a wonderful place surrounded by where it is easy to learn about living on the water.

I will miss a lot of things including my cozy upstairs spot for reading a book in the winter sunshine but most of all I will miss my morning check of the dock where I have sometimes been greeted by river otters, a great blue heron or even an osprey. If you want more information about living on the Crystal Coast, I have been writing about living in the area since 2006, you will find an index to those posts here. There is additional information on my Crystal Coast site.

An Adventure Lived Well

Back in 2008, I wrote a post about what was our recent decision to move to Carteret County, North Carolina.  I likened moving to finding your mate. I said something to the effect that dating your mate is a little like visiting the place you want to move. I also suggested that just as you really do not get to know your life's partner until you get married, you never really understand a place until you move there.

Here we are in 2019, we have listed our home in Carteret County and are in our fourteenth year living on the Crystal Coast. What can we say about life in Carteret County?  Was our leap of faith to move to the North Carolina coast a good decision?  What have we learned?

The first lesson is an easy one.  What is around your house is as important or more important than your house.  The particular setting of our home on Raymond's Gut just off the White Oak River has spoiled us.  We have water in our backyard along with great egrets, great blue herons, osprey, otters, and other creatures.  When we were looking for a home on the water, we did not understand living on the water like we do now. This close connection to nature is the best since we left our farm in Canada in 1984. Life by the water has brought us many treasured moments.

The next lesson is a reinforcement of what we have seen in our other moves. The area where you move will have even more impact on your happiness than your actual neighbors. Carteret County has a reputation for good schools and reasonable growth. We have seen the benefits of the measured growth in our years here. The services available now are even more than we hoped for when we moved here. There was one drugstore when we came, there are now three.  Lowe's Home Improvement which came a year or so after our move is less than ten minutes from our home. Swansboro's nearly new Walmart is less than fifteen minutes. While the restaurants have changed, we still do not have to go far to enjoy a meal outside our home.  Just about anything else you could dream of except Costco is available in Jacksonville less than thirty minutes away or Morehead City about twenty minutes down the road. Had we moved to a less prosperous area, I think we would have been disappointed. We also do not mind visiting Wilmington once in a while to get a Costco fix.

The third lesson is to go for the things that are most important to you. Our new home on the water ended up a better fit for us than the similarly-priced old beach house four rows back that was our other choice. Both homes were close in price. Had we bought the beach house, it would have been easier to walk on the beach but much harder to boat or kayak. The beach house would have meant giving up not only the direct water access from our yard but also the water views that have so enriched our lives.  Being able to see the water from our home was high on our original list.

Lesson four, things that you do not think about can end up making a big difference. When we picked our new home, we never considered how nice it would be to have our own microclimate with a south-facing wall.  We also did not realize the way our house and the houses beside us were positioned would come to give us far more privacy than many of the new homes in the subdivision. We also no idea how wonderful it could be to have the swimming pool less than a five-minute walk so it would be easy for the grandchildren to come home when tired or go over after dinner for a quick dip. Finally, our location at the back of Raymond's Gut, a good distance off the river has turned out to be a good place to weather storms that visit the area.  We have never even had to take our boat off the lift even during Irene or Florence, the two most significant storms in our years here.

Lesson five, if you are going to do remodeling, go ahead and do it as soon as you can so you can enjoy it. We were able to add almost 1,000 square feet which included the nicest office for writing that I have ever had and a great room with amazing views of the water.  I am glad we did it early enough to use it and love what it brought to our home.

Carteret County turned out to be the right spot for us when we moved here.  We have come to know and love the area. If our grandchildren were here, we would not be moving. Everyone should have a list of what they want if they are planning on a move. Keep going over the list until you are certain of it.  When you are deciding on where to move, visit it during rainy and cold weather in addition to beautiful days. Imagine yourself living in the place that is at the top of your list. Ask questions of your realtor, but also ask questions of the people who might be your neighbors.

Moving is not easy but I am happy that Carteret County had a chance to find a way into our hearts. If you love the water, like a slow pace of life, enjoy roads that are rarely clogged with traffic, and want a place with unparalleled scenic beauty, visit Carteret County.  It might be the start of a love affair and a place that meets your needs for the next decade.

Living ten minutes from the beaches did not stop me from hiking all the beaches that my heart desired. I learned how to safely boat down here in the waters of the White Oak River and Bogue Sound with even a few adventures out into the Atlantic Ocean.  The White Oak River also became my personal kayaking paradise often delivering wonderful drum, trout, and flounder that we enjoyed fresh from the water. 

We had as friends and neighbors wonderful people, some with deep roots in Carteret County and others from places about as far from here as you can get and still be in the United States.  All things considered, the leap of faith was worth it.  Missing all the winter weather that used to keep us on our mountain in Roanoke, Virginia has been a real treat as was being able to garden twelve months out of the year.  I would have never guessed that I would end up liking Emerald Isle so much that I did an annually updated travel guide for six years.

 

A Gardening Update

Last fall I posted an article, Compost at the Coast. It was about changes to my composting system. I went through a winter with the system and I have made some adjustments. I found that my new rotating compost bins work best when given materials that have already started decomposing so I added a plastic garbage can. It actually doesn't need to be a full-sized garbage can but I went with full size because it was easiest to get. One third the size would be about right. When the weather gets cooler, I might cut it to that size.

I also added a smaller rectangular container to hold our organic waste when the barrel was in its composting mode. What ends up happening is that about two weeks worth of "nutrients" go into the barrel. Those nutrients are mixed and covered with the right amount of brown material to make certain that a proper carbon to nitrogen ratio is maintained for efficient composting. If you need more information on composting and keeping that ratio right, this page is a great resource.

At around three weeks, I empty my rotating barrels of compost and put them in the large square storage bin. I then shovel the decomposing material from the garbage barrel into the two rotating bins. I have learned that filling each rotating bin about one-third full works best. I close them up and give them a spin every few days.

Once my garbage barrel is empty, I pour what I have collected in my small container into the barrel. I thoroughly soak it and cover it with a one to two-inch layer of Daddy Pete's Raised Bed Mix. I like that particular brand and type because it has a little more of the woody material needed for good composting.

During the next week to ten days, I empty our nutrients collected from the kitchen directly into the barrel and add a little Raised Bed Mix every few days. Once or twice I will stir the materials with a shovel. After I have two weeks or so of rotting materials in the barrel, I cover it and soak it again. For the next week or ten days, nothing goes into the barrel.  All our nutrients go into the square container.

Then the cycle starts over again with the rotating bins being emptied and the materials from the garbage barrel being put in the rotating bins.

Maybe all of this sounds like a lot of work, but I can guarantee that good compost yields amazing results in the garden. Our sixteen feet of green bean trellis produced over fifteen pounds of beans. Our two small beds, one of them raised gave us over twenty-five heads of lettuce.  We ate the lettuce from the last of March until the last refrigerated head of Romaine was served in mid-June.  You can add spinach, spring onions, banana peppers, and tomatoes to our list of successful crops.  This year the garden also produced a monster cucumber plant which happens to be planted at the base of our compost storage bin.

Here is a link to a photo album of pictures which go from when the garden was planted in February to when we decided to give up on the remaining green beans and start preparing the soil for a fall crop.

Compost at the Coast

It was at least four or five years ago when my granddaughter found a library book that talked about compost. As she found out, the Crystal Coast has everything you need for compost: air, nutrients, heat, and moisture.  She was so interested that I helped her make a compost pile behind our house. It did not work very well because a raccoon stirred it up. I quickly developed a system that allowed us to compost without help from the local wildlife. It was a much smaller scale than when I used a 60HP four-wheel drive tractor to turn our composting cow manure at Tay Ridge Angus back in the late seventies, but the principles of making compost are the same.

I bought three large garbage cans, cut the bottoms out of them and staked them in place. I eventually added a scavenged storage bin for the finished compost. The tops of the garbage cans had holes drilled in them and I used weights and/or bungee cords to keep the critters out.

We dumped all our vegetable and paper waste except newspapers into the compost bins. Some garden waste also joined the household waste, but we were careful not to put tomato vines or any others that might be diseased into our bins.  Since we do not have a shredder/grinder, sticks and coarser items still went to the dump. I layered my bins either with hardwood mulch or inexpensive coarse soil which passes for topsoil. I also added some water to the bin and used a shovel to turn it occasionally. Once the bin was full I turned the contents upside down by shoveling it to the next bin.  Then I would start all over.  You have to keep the green succulent stuff to about one third the volume of what you put in the barrel.  We keep that ratio by using everything from coffee grounds and filters to used paper towels and woody mulch or topsoil with lots of mulch.

The material in the second bin would get stirred a little by shovel over the next month to six weeks. After that time its volume would be reduced by half. At that point, I would turn the contents upside down once again by shoveling it into my third garbage bin.  Once the third bin was full, I would shovel it into the square storage bin.  We figured out that we generate enough compostable materials to create about 8 cubic feet of compost every six to seven months.

We usually put our compost on the garden in the February to March period and again in the September to October timeframe.  If I have a surplus, I bag it in old bird seed bags and store it.

The system worked well but was very labor intensive and took up a lot of space.  We recently modernized with a dual chamber HotFrog rotating composter.  I went with the HotFrog because it did not have dozens of screws that might rust holding the bins together. The first batch has already come out but it is a little early to say how it will work during our relatively mild winters.  I am hopeful that we get the same great compost with a whole lot less work.

Here is a picture of our compost storage bin which should be done with its final cooking in the next four weeks or so. At that time we will empty it and start the process over.  This is the last of the three barrels that we used in the past.  We used it to transition to our new system. While you cannot feel the quality of soil from a picture, you can get an idea of the soil our continuous applications of compost have helped create by looking at soil just to the left of the Vinca in this photograph.

Find more links to information about the Crystal Coast at my CrystalCoast.me website.

An Abundant Coastal Spring Garden

The one positive thing about a cool spring is that it is great for growing certain vegetables like broccoli and lettuce.  Our gardening space is limited but we still found room for over thirty heads of lettuce.

With the recent Romaine lettuce scare, our organic, homegrown Romaine has gotten very popular. I can only eat lettuce two meals a day at best so we have given away a lot of lettuce.

Gardening on the coastal plain of North Carolina is different but can be very rewarding.  You have to work with the weather when you can and work around it when you cannot. The lettuce and broccoli pictured to the left were planted on February 10. We started eating lettuce the last week in March.  We usually get four good weeks of lettuce. This year it looks like we will have five weeks or more.

Our garden does well and I attribute a lot of our success to the compost that we make each year. If you look at the soil around our plants on February 10 when I planted them, you do not have to be a farmer to guess that it is very rich soil.  We have been working on it for years.  All vegetable and fruit trimmings, coffee grounds, eggshells, and discarded non-greasy paper products except for newspapers go into our compost bins.

My process is a very manual one of shoveling the compost from the first bin to one of three others. The material as it makes its way through the barrels rots.  I emptied my large square compost bin in late January and spread it onto my garden spots.  By end of summer, the bin will be ready to empty again as we start cleaning out beds.  The twice a year application of compost has made our soil a powerhouse.  The only plants that get a boost are my tomato plants which get some liquid fertilizer every couple of weeks during the summer.

Even with rich soil and great weather, our spring garden is winding down.  We will still be eating lettuce, spinach, broccoli, and onions for a while longer but if the heat comes quickly, the lettuce will also turn bitter fast. However, we already have tomatoes, peppers, and green beans growing as our summer crops.  While our tomatoes are not going to be ripe by that May 30 date like they often do, we should have tomatoes by end of the first week of June. A lot depends on the heat we get.  Our green beans will also come in during June. The green bean plants are about two inches high now.

All we have left to do for the summer garden is to stick in a cucumber plant and put in our second crop tomato plants which will provide us with tomatoes in late summer and fall. Sometimes we have enjoyed those tomatoes as late as December.  We will pull our green beans out in August and plant another crop of them in mid-September. If all goes well we will harvest them in early November. Once the heat is gone in the fall, usually after the middle of October, we will once again plant lettuce, onions, broccoli, and spinach.  Sometimes we plant kale for the winter.

It is not unusual for us to eat some of that fall lettuce in January and even into February. That did not happen this year as the extreme cold temperatures took out all of our fall plantings that had survived through December.

Every gardening year is different and it can be especially exciting in a place where it is sometimes possible to harvest crops twelve months out of the year. There is always a surprise in a garden.  The first of ours this year happened to be the strawberries that took over one of our beds.  We could have pulled them out but it was fun watching them grow and we have enjoyed having strawberries growing alongside our driveway. My wife even made a strawberry sonker out of the first part of our berry harvest. For those who did not grow up in Surry or Stokes County in North Carolina, this is a good article on sonkers.

 

 

Persistent Tomatoes Highlight Fall

While I have been absent from my soapbox for a while, one of my wagon train tomatoes continues to solider on into the fall of 2017.  My originial three wagon train tomatoes went into their pots about August 22, 2016.  They were amazingly productive in the spring of 2017. In early summer as the plants appeared to be finished, I cut their stems off just above the ground.

One plant had such a will to live that it sprouted new growth. My wife who always has a soft spot for a struggling plant took it under her care. In September, thirteen months after we planted it, we enjoyed a few nice tomatoes off of it.  All of our other tomatoes planted in the spring except for one were long gone. The picture of the green tomato was taken October 10, 2017 so it is likely we will enjoy another handful of tomatoes in November.

I am amazed that a tomato plant could last this long and continue to produce tasty tomatoes. While we had plenty of tomatoes this summer, it was not the bumper crop that we have enjoyed in previous years.  Many of our plants were felled by a disease that quickly killed them as they were approaching peak production.  We will try planting more tomatoes in pots next year. We planted tomatoes where our beans had grown for the last three years but it did not seem to help.

Aside from tomatoes, our spring and early summer garden was exceptional, lettuce, spring onions, spinach, beans, and cucumbers almost overwhelmed us.  Precipitation during the growing season was close to what we needed.  From January 1, through May 31, we recorded 18.45 inches. June brought 6.05 inches, July 6.20 inches, August a wet 9.27 inches, and September  6.90 inches.  So far October has been dry with only .55 inches in a couple of showers.

At this still summer-like point, our only fall crops are some hot peppers and cucumbers that refuse to give up and our second planting of green beans that should be ready to harvest in November.  With temperatures still in the eighties, it is still too hot for our fall lettuce, broccoli, and onions.  This year I do not plan to do another set of fall wagon train tomatoes but I will be starting a few plants in December and hopefully put them in our wagon in January or February.

The Crystal Coast remains a great place to garden, fish, and live.  If you are interested in visiting, fall is a great time.  The crowds are gone and soon the humidity will also disappear. If you need some guidance for your trip, try our book, A Week at the Beach - The Emerald Isle Travel Guide.  For full details on our great summer visit this site.

Twelve Months of Crystal Coast Gardening

We have been through eleven winters along the Crystal Coast and ten of them have involved some gardening.  Three years ago I wrote about Gardening in December.  In those three years, I have worked hard at refining our winter gardening techniques.  One of our most successful ventures has been our Wagon Train Tomatoes.  The plants were put into planters on wagons around the third week in August. We hauled them in and out of the garage depending on the weather.  This year we have enjoyed tasty, ripe tomatoes in December, January, and February.  We will likely get a few in March just as we are putting our first 2017 plants in the ground.  Our late tomato crop has been amazing with more than enough to eat and plenty to share a few.  I picked another eight tomatoes on February 21.  Aside from our traveling tomatoes that go in and out of the garage as the weather changes, we have also managed to enjoy lettuce, kale, and rutabaga this winter.

Aside from some very cold weather on January 7-10, the winter of 2016-17 has been a mild one and since the first of the year, it has also been dry. We got over six inches of rain in December but only slightly over three inches of rain in January.  February has been even drier with only one and one half inches with one week left to go in the month.  We could actually use some rain which is not something we have said a lot in the last couple of years.

I got all of our beds ready for bad weather before the end of December.  The bad weather never came. We did pull some of our rutabagas with the approaching cold weather in early January and I put buckets over three over-wintering heads of lettuce and our Swiss Chard.  The 15F temperature was cold enough to melt our Swiss Chard and to damage some leaves on our kale.  I picked the damaged kale leaves off and we should enjoy some fresh kale before the beginning of March.  This last week of February has been so nice that I transplanted broccoli and Romain lettuce plants into our raised bed on February 20. Some radish seeds also went into the ground on the same day and I planted onion sets the next day.

My tomato seedlings are from two to four inches high so they are on track to go into the ground around the end of March unless this exceptional weather continues.  As much as I love this weather, you cannot fall in love with warm days in February because the cold winds of March will likely break your heart.  I have seen far too many late snow storms ruin an early spring than I care to remember.

The plants that I have put in the ground are a gamble, but I already have backup plants growing.  It is always challenging when you are trying to out guess mother nature.  If you wait too long, the weather can be too hot for lettuce, broccoli, and other cool weather plants. If you plant too early, your plants will go into suspended animation.  One year it was so wet that over half of my onion sets rotted.  I am only going to plant half of the bag onion sets that I have.  If they do well, great.  If not I will plant some new ones and hope for better luck.

It would be rare to have an early spring warm-up without some shots of cold March air. It also takes longer than most people imagine for our waters to get warm. Slowly warming water and cool spring winds protect us from early heat waves but keep our soils cool.

Once our tomato plants are in the ground around the end of March/early April, we will start thinking about planting our green beans, squash, and peppers.  Our second crop of green beans this year was severely damaged by Hurricane Matthew so we are hoping this early crop does well.

If you want to enjoy vegetable gardening, find yourself a home on the Crystal Coast.  Just make certain that it has a south-facing garage like our home so you can try some wagon train tomatoes.

Wagon Train Tomatoes

I actually do not say "Wagons Ho!" when I go out and move my mobile tomatoes around in their wagons.  There might be some young folks around who would think I am crazy since they missed Wagon Train when they were growing up.

People that know me well understand I have been growing tomatoes for years in places as diverse as the cool coastal climate along the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, the hardwood hills of central New Brunswick, a mountainside overlooking Roanoke, Virginia, and currently along the marshes of the Southern Outer Banks on Raymond's Gut just a few miles up the White Oak River.

My first online post about tomatoes, The Spring Tomato Ritual, was written April 25, 2005.  This year, 2016, has been a tough year for tomatoes.  We had plenty of delicious tomatoes but it was not a bumper crop. The North Carolina coast had too much heat and too much moisture, eight to sixteen inches more rain than normal depending on where you live.  We had 38.5 inches of rain from June 1 until October 9, 2016. We had a good sixteen inches more than we needed.

Back in September, I wrote that this year we were planting our tomatoes in pots. The wagon train tomatoes have done very well as you can see from this November 10, 2016 picture.  Having the tomatoes in wagons definitely helped during the wind and rain from Hurricane Matthew.  It has also helped that we have had amazing fall weather since early October.

The last that I counted, I found that we have over 25 tomatoes growing already.  If we can keep them on the vine until mid-December, the ones that do not ripen will ripen inside and provide us with tomatoes into January.  I know it is possible since we picked our last big tomato last year around December 27 and our last cherry tomatoes close to the middle of January. The big difference was that I had to protect them with tarps and even heat lamps.  Also, we had a very low yield. Lots of work with the tarps and few tomatoes convinced me to try growing in pots in wagons.

The tomatoes are not the only vegetables doing well.  We are getting ready to enjoy some November green beans from the garden.  We have had lots of fall cucumbers, onions and an outstanding crop of lettuce. Broccoli, rutabagas, Romaine lettuce and Swiss chard are growing in the raised bed where we have grown our fall tomatoes in other years.  We even have peppers and Dinosaur kale growing.  The Swiss Chard usually survives the winter and we will likely enjoy the kale well into January.

I doubt that we will have cherry tomatoes growing outside in mid-January like we did last year as you can see in this picture.  However, one of our wagon train tomatoes might still be producing at that time. I credit the great fall garden to the great month of weather that we have enjoyed since Hurricane Matthew clipped the area.

With a frost-free growing season that often stretches to 236 days and some veggies that go well beyond that, there is little downtime for our beds. There is usually only about a month between our last harvest of rutabagas and when we start planting some of our spring lettuce, onions, and broccoli at the end of February.

During January and February, I also end up taking care of my tomato seedlings. My tomato seeds get planted inside the second or third week of January so gardening is pretty well twelve months of the year along Raymond's Gut.

Harvesting a few almost year-round vegetables grown with our homemade compost and lots of love is a hobby that both my wife and I love. After all, you have to do something when you are not working or fishing.

Another Fall, More Gardening

September does not bring an end to gardening on the Crystal Coast like it does for my friends in New Brunswick, Canada. This last week of September 2016, they have already had a couple of frosts.  Frost is not the biggest enemy of fall gardens here.  Usually excessive moisture and heat cause more problems than cool temperatures.

Our fall garden here on the banks of Raymonds Gut just off the White Oak River is finally all in the ground as October arrives this coming Saturday.  We have a few small beds and have planted buttercrunch lettuce, onions, Romaine lettuce, cucumbers, green beans, rutabagas, broccoli, Swiss chard, tomatoes, and kale.  We still have peppers growing that we planted last spring.

The biggest gamble in fall gardening on the coast is timing. If the weather turns back hot as it did this year, you can lose your lettuce plants. We have planted lettuce twice and it appears that what I put in the ground this last week in September is going to survive.  Of the dozen and half lettuce plants I put into the ground earlier in September only three or four are going to make it and one of them is about to bolt.

We are enduring another very wet summer and as of September 29 have recorded 33.43 inches of rain since June 1, 2016. It was so wet and so very hot that we pulled out tomato plants that usually bear well into September. The heat that I wrote about in early July and late July stayed with us through most of September.

This is our tenth summer on the Crystal Coast and it was far hotter than normal with almost no breaks in the heat waves.  We had a long period when the temperatures at night did not get below 85F.  It was that kind of weather that stopped our late tomatoes from setting fruit.  Still it was a great beach summer and there was no shortage of vegetables. Local produce stands were overflowing with the bounty from the area's soils.

Last year my fall gardening post showed my tomato plants being planted in a raised bed.  While we managed to pick large tomatoes the last week in December 2015 and cherry tomatoes the middle of January 2016, we did not get a lot of quantity for all the work. I decided to change tactics this year.  This year I have planted my tomatoes in pots and have the tomatoes in a wagon so I can haul them in during the heavy rainfall that has plagued us during the last couple of fall gardening seasons.  So far the plants are thriving and I should easily be able to protect them from the early frost that we sometimes get in November.  They already have some small tomatoes on them so I have high hopes.

You might notice that the picture at the top of the post showing lettuce that I recently planted looks very similar to a picture that I posted in early spring when we first put out our spring lettuce and tomatoes. While this fall the bed has buttercrunch instead of the Romaine last spring, is an amazing few square feet of ground.  That small garden bed produced lettuce in the spring, tomatoes all summer and now will provide some more lettuce and cucumbers before its winter rest.  December can be a great month for gardens here on the coast but we will give that over producing bed some rest this year from November until March.

Most gardeners will tell you that not every season is great for every crop. Our garden here on the coast is no different. We had plenty of tomatoes this summer but not the over abundance that we usually have.  We had more cucumbers and beans than we have ever gotten.  We also had a few nice cantaloupes.  We had so many heads of lettuce in the spring that it was a chore to find homes for the overabundance.

Gardening is usually not as easy as it looks but it is far more rewarding than most people imagine.  There is nothing like fresh produce from the garden.  When we finally bring in our rutabagas in late January and call it quits for a month, it is always a reminder that we will will soon be planting once again with the hopes that we can have another bountiful season.