The Crystal Coast, Salt water on my feet

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.

We were ready for the rain

Gardening is tricky stuff no matter where you live if you depend on mother nature for your moisture and heat.  Gardening also takes constant work.  You cannot plant and just leave it.  I had one of those the summer that I got married in 1973.  Between traveling up and down the up coast to get married, weeding got pushed down the list.  By the time my bride and I got home in August which is peak harvest month in Nova Scotia, I had to run a lawn mower between the rows of the garden at our Saint Croix Cove home before I worked them with the tiller. It was still a great garden (see these pictures) but it was a lesson that I never forgot.  It is better to do a little gardening each day instead of depending on getting to it someday.

As you can see from the post picture at the top taken on May 22, 2016, our little round bed has changed a lot in the nearly two months since I first wrote about it.  My intentions were good and I hoped to write a post in April but trying to finish up my year as treasurer of our HOA nearly swamped me.  This picture of the Romaine lettuce in the bed was taken on April 9.  The lettuce started small but grew quickly.  We enjoyed a bounty of lettuce totaling thirty-one heads when you include our buttercrunch bed. We did give away nearly one half to friends.   We have been amply rewarded for our generosity.  We got red leaf and lettuce and cabbage collards back in return.

The picture at the top of the post shows our Umberto tomato bed after this weekend's welcome rain. After they were planted, they were pruned twice, weeded and given liquid fertilizer three times. As the lettuce matured, it was cut and the lettuce roots were chopped a little and put in our compost bins. Other than being watered a couple of times and having cages added for support, that is all that we needed to do to our tomatoes to get them ready for this week's rain and next week's heat.  Our tomatoes are stretched out over four additional beds so it does take some work.

We now have a pepper in the ground, a cantaloupe already blooming, tiny beans filling out quickly, and more snow peas than we can eat.  So far this has been a good gardening season.  We just harvested the last of our spinach this week and will be eating off what my wife cut for another week.  We have lots of small and medium sized green tomatoes so we are anxiously awaiting the first ripe tomatoes.

There still are challenges.  We could get too much rain or it could get too hot too fast.  Right now if we could get a couple of weeks of serious sunshine and warmth, then we will likely have some ripe tomatoes at a time close to when we used to put  our tomato plants in the ground on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick.  In the next week, I will plant some additional tomato seeds.  I fell behind on that also, but a handful of new plants to put in the ground around the first of August will insure that we have some late season tomatoes.  Last year we had tomatoes well into the new year.

 

Crystal Coast Tomatoes

I would like to say that the secret to great tomatoes is eating more Chinese food but there is a little more to it than saving your chopsticks during the year because they are helpful when growing tomatoes.  I have been growing tomatoes for 44 years.  I have grown them in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Virginia, and most recently in North Carolina which is where I learned how to grow tomatoes long ago by watching my mother and my wife's father.

I have been writing about growing tomatoes for at almost eleven years with my first article being, The Spring Tomato Ritual.  While tomatoes are one of the three things I have said Southerners should grow, gardening especially for tomatoes can be challenging here on the coast.  The rhythm of gardening is different here on the coast.  As hard as it is to believe, we picked our last full sized ripe tomato on December 27, this year.  We got our last ripe cherry tomatoes on January 14, which was the same day we cleaned the green ones off the plant. We were still eating ripe homegrown full sized tomatoes in January.  We finished the last of our ripe cherry tomatoes the third week in February.  We have had some great tomato seasons on the coast with some beautiful crops and once picked over 100 tomatoes in one day.  We drove some of them to relatives in the Piedmont area of the state where tomatoes are not usually ripe until early July.  We often get our first ripe homegrown tomatoes the last week in May.

Since I love early (and late) tomatoes, growing tomatoes is something that I take seriously.  You might not have as much tomato love as I do, but some of my tips might help you be successful in what can be a challenging gardening climate along the Crystal Coast of North Carolina.  The difficulties that you face on our NC coast are far different from the climatic challenge that can make tomatoes something of a gardener's annual victory in eastern Canada.

Our coastal climate is very dependent on where you live.  Our home and garden area is on the water or Raymond's Gut just off the White Oak River about three miles up river from Swansboro, NC and the Intracoastal Waterway.  Our climate is tempered by the water but we have had frost as late as March 29.  In fact just last year on that date I lost half of my tomatoes to frost even though they were covered with plastic pails.

I am getting head of myself.  For me tomatoes start with seed.  I usually order my seed by the end of the first week of January.  The year I planted my seeds on January 30.  As you can see from this picture of my tomato seed incubator, it is something of cobbled together outfit.  I use the standard plastic four pack planting pots and square plastic trays that I found at Dollar General for $1 each.  I fill each tray with four four packs. I use one of the trays on the top and bottom to start.  I use potting mix that I buy from Redfearn's Nursery in Cedar Point.  It is the same potting mix he uses to grow his own plants.  I fill each hole with potting soil, wet it a couple of times, and then pour off the excess water that has collected on the tray.  I make a couple of small indentations with a chopstick and try to get just one seed in each hole.  I put the plastic tray top on the cubes, put them on a table that gets sunshine in my office and wait.  In a week to ten days I have a good crop of tiny tomato seedlings.

As you can see from the picture, there are often two or three seedlings in each hole.  When the plants have gotten their second set of leaves, I take the plastic tray that I used for the top and put four more four packs on it.  Again I fill them with potting soil, wet, and drain.  Then I use a plastic knife and spoon to divide the cubes with more than one plant. I carefully place the plants that I separate in a new hole.  Remember to add soil where you took out soil and to carefully add soil around the moved plants. I water the transplants and survivors after adding more planting mix.  It is not unusual for the seedlings to get leggy at this time and need a little support.  I cut chopsticks in half and position them as needed to keep the plants going straight. Sometimes I change the sticks as I rotate the trays three or four times each day as the plants turn towards the sun.

About five to six weeks after I have planted the seeds (around the middle of March this year), I re-pot all my tomato plants into standard peat pots.  Each peat pot get about two tablespoons of potting soil in the bottom, a tablespoon of composted manure, a sprinkle of bone meal, and a few Osomocote long-lasting fertilizer beads.  On top of that goes another tablespoon of potting soil.  I then use my plastic knife to loosen the plant from the edges of the cube and lift it out with a plastic spoon.  I like to make certain all the cubes are wet before I start this.  Once the tomato with its cube of soil is in peat pot I press it down firmly and fill around the plant with more potting soil.  Then I water again and transfer to our wagon and wheelbarrow that are used for hardening off the tomatoes.

At this point the tomatoes are living in the garage and going outside when it is nice and coming back in at night.  You might notice that many of the plants now require a full size chopstick to keep growing straight.  If you look closely, you will see green Velcro planting tape collars on particularly tall plants.  This year the plants stayed in the garage roughly ten days to two weeks.  Wind can really beat plants up at the coast.  That is one of the reasons we use the wagon and wheelbarrow.  If it gets very windy or rainy, we put the plants in the garage.  They also have to be watered at least once each day.

After getting used to living outside, the first fourteen plants went in the ground on March 24 and I planted another 15 plants on March 26.  Before I start putting them into the ground I make sure each peat pot is soaked.  Because of our deep, rock free soil, I am able to plant our tomatoes with a bulb planter. I push it into the ground as far as possible and bring out a core a dirt as cleanly as I can.  I turn the bulb planter upside down over a bucket and tap the bottom of the bucket with the handle. The dirt and sand falls into the bucket without much work. Once again I add bonemeal and Osomocote to the bottom of the hole.  This time I put a trowel full of our homemade compost over that and then I remove the tomato plant from the peat pot, pinch any lower leaves off and carefully place into the hole.  I put the dirt/sand back into the hole in such a way to get the plant straight in the hole. Then once again I water the plant.  After that I put a couple of trowels of Daddy Pete's Raised bed mix around the plant.  Daddy Pete's has a little mulch in it and it helps keeps the plants moist.

By soaking the roots and soil around the tomato plant and then burying it and watering again, you remove most of the risk of the tomato plant dying from being too dry.  In general once tomato plants are in the ground, I try not to water more than once every three days.  That promotes deep root growth.  By burying the tomato several inches, it will have deep roots.  If you compare this picture of the planted Umberto to the Umberto in its peat pot before it was planted, you get an idea of how much of the plant is underground.

So far I have 29 plants in the ground and have given away 23 plants.  I have another 24 left for my daughters. After they pick what they want, I will be giving away a few more to neighbors.

I will be posting further information on tomato pests and even how to prune your tomatoes for maximum yield.  I will also be planting a few more tomato seeds on April 15 and June 1.  I find that having fresh plants makes it easier for the tomatoes to keep producing in the fall and even into early winter.

 

 

The Hesitation Between Seasons

Today the sunshine on the Crystal Coast is so bright that taking a picture of Raymond's Gut, our inlet, is challenge. Winter brings us intense colors but not a lot of cold or snow.  I like to think that is one of the reasons our great egret friend, Frank 29X, pictured here visits us each year.

A lot of folks besides Frank 29X come to the coast of North Carolina to get away from winter.  However, we make no claims to being immune to a taste of real winter.  Once some folks get here they decide they never want to feel even a touch of winter.  They end up moving further south, usually to Florida.

Then there those of us who have seen plenty of winter in our lives and appreciate a little reminder of what we are missing.  Winter is not harsh in coastal North Carolina except we tend to think it is tough because we have so much really nice weather.  Some years winter finds us by the end of December but not this year.  I am writing this in mid-January and I had to open the windows in my office because it had gotten too warm.  Today, January 16, we once again got into the mid-sixties but our version of winter is knocking on the door.

This has not been our mildest winter. The crown for that goes to the winter of 2006-2007 when we only had nineteen hours of below freezing temperatures the whole winter.  I doubt that we had what I call a winter day all that winter.  My winter day is any day when the temperature does not rise about fifty degrees Fahrenheit.  We have already had two or three of those this year and perhaps eight or ten hours below freezing.  Still, we have been able to enjoy a cherry tomato plant that remains growing in a protected corner just outside our garage.

However, as you can see from this forecast for the third week in January, we are going to have some cold days this upcoming week.  We will pick the remaining cherry tomatoes on the plant this Sunday. We picked a nice batch of them today. Then we will only have a few rutabaga growing in our garden until we start planting things once again in February.  That means not much will be going on outside.

Beyond the lack of a garden to take care of, the water is now too cold for kayaking or to go flying down the river in an open skiff. That leaves about a month to enjoy walks along the marsh and through the woods.  Even with the walks, it is a time when I struggle a little because my mind is on the water and my body is mostly stuck on land.  I need more than my job to keep me busy or I will end up baking too many biscuits.

Fall is such a wonderful time on the coast and our stretched-out spring is just as good. Life on the Crystal Coast offers us so much choice of what to do most of the time, that our short winter leaves me hoping for more of something.  It is too early for the spring festivals which start in March.  I have often found that  a trip to Beaufort or one of the local museums like the Maritime Museum or the NC Aquarium can get me through this period.

Visitors often help shorten the season. We usually get a good dose of ones from the natural world. Our Canadian great egret, Frank 29X, returned for his fourth straight winter visit to Raymond's Gut on December 29 this year.  The five otters that frequent our gut have been visible several times including the time when I caught this otter enjoying a snack.  We have also had a pair of great blue herons stalking the marsh.  Our normal cast of characters, the kingfisher, the grebes, and the rotating cormorants have been around most of the winter.  I have only seen one pelican, but they usually wait until the serious cold weather before holing up in the marsh.  The smaller birds must still be up north since we just have a few chickadees.

It is a good time of year to work on an update to our Emerald Isle Travel guide.  The update I am working on will be free if you buy the current Kindle version of the book.  Our month of winter is also a great time to get prepared for spring.  I have ordered some tomato seeds and will be planting some next weekend.  My skiff still needs some work and it is time to sharpen some hooks for spring fishing.

Our month of winter is just about the right amount of downtime for our garden and me.  Of course the yard mowing downtime lasts a lot longer here than it does in some places.  We stop mowing in early October and rarely do any mowing until late April. That's fine with me because by then the garden is already in full swing and we are usually out on the water.

Our great weather, like most things in life, is hard to appreciate without a taste of something not so nice. So I will proudly stand up take my month of winter weather. I can only hope that a month of it is all that I have to endure.  After all this is North Carolina and when we get to February 15, spring is just around the corner and from there we can often see the summer beach season.

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