So as I sit here writing it’s snowing outside. And yet, two days ago I harvested and ate my first salad of the season. I’ve been craving some fresh greens (I’ve been eating my frozen kale all winter long and still have a lot to go) and assumed I’d get some sort of early harvest because of my cold frame.

Greens in Cold Frame- March 4, 2013

But it was a shock on Monday when I went out to my cold frame to open it up (so the temperature inside didn’t get too high) and saw many of the plants inside (mustard, arugula & lettuce mostly) were suddenly of harvestable size, smallish, but still harvestable.

Arugula, Lettuce & Mustard

As you can see from the top picture there’s plenty of empty space in the cold frame, so I’m going to throw some addition seed in there this week. More of what’s already there, plus some beets. It would be too early to start any of these without protection, but it’s perfectly fine in a cold frame.

If you’re planning on getting your garden going early, you should already be starting seeds either in a cold frame, in a greenhouse, or inside under lights. Seeds you can/should start now include any member of the Onion family, Cabbage family (Cabbage, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Kale, Mustard, Bok Choy), Beets, Arugula, Lettuces, & Spinach.

May you grow your own salad as early as you can.

I compiled a bunch of sweet potato recipes a couple of years ago when I first planted sweet potatoes and I finally got around to making this one. My wife says the cakes are delicious. I don’t like salmon so I haven’t tried them myself, and yes, I know disliking salmon is sacrilege among foodies everywhere, but that’s just how it is. I hope you enjoy them.

Salmon & Sweet Potato Cake on Spring Greens

Cakes
12-14 oz sweet potato, peeled and cubed
Salt
3 (6-ounce) pieces salmon fillet
1 cup white wine
1 bay leaf
Freshly ground black pepper
1 Tbsp seafood seasoning
1 1/2 cups cracker crumbs
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves or 1 tsp dried
1 Tbsp hot sauce (optional)
2 scallions, finely chopped
3 – 4 Tbsp chopped fresh dill or 1 Tbsp dried
2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

Agrodolce Sauce
Poaching liquid from cooking the salmon
2 Tbsp tomato paste or 4-5 ¼” wide strips tomato leather
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 Tbsp sugar

Seafood seasoning
1 Tbsp ground Bay leaves
2 ½ tsp celery salt
1 ½ tsp mustard seeds, ground
1 ½ tsp black peppercorns, ground
¾ tsp ground nutmeg
½ tsp each of ground ginger, cloves & paprika
½ tsp cayenne (optional)

Put sweet potatoes in a small pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil over high heat. Salt the water and cook until tender, 10 to 12 minutes. Drain, then mash the potatoes.

Meanwhile, put the salmon fillets in a skillet with the wine, bay leaf, and enough water to come up to the top of the fillets, but do not cover. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then reduce heat to a simmer and poach until opaque about 8 to 10 minutes. Remove the skin and transfer the salmon to a bowl. Flake the fish with a fork and season with salt and pepper, to taste. Add the mashed sweet potatoes to the bowl along with the seafood seasoning, half of the cracker crumbs, the egg, thyme, hot sauce, scallions, and dill. Mix to combine. The fish cake mixture needs to be just firm enough to mold into cakes. If its too wet, add a few more crumbs.

Heat a large skillet over medium heat, add olive oil. Form the salmon mixture into 8 (4-inch) patties, coat in the remaining crumbs, and then add them to pan. Cook the fish cakes until light golden, about 3-4 minutes on each side.

Add the sauce ingredients to a small pot. Bring to a boil on medium- high, reduce heat and cook until sauce is thickened, a little looser than ketchup.

Arrange the fish cakes on individual serving plates. Top with the agrodolce sauce and serve.

Notes:
If you are gluten-sensitive, rice crackers or nuts (I’ve used pecans, but I’m sure other nuts are fine, if you prefer) can be substituted for the cracker crumbs.

This recipe works well with canned salmon also. If using canned salmon, use the liquid from the can and 1 cup wine to substitute for the poaching liquid.

Commercial seafood seasoning is available, but there is no standard recipe and making the seafood seasoning fresh gives more intense flavor. The recipe above makes more than needed for the recipe. Store the remainder in a tightly closed glass spice jar.

Salmon cakes may also be served on a bed of arugula.

In case you’re interested in eating food I make, you can get some at the Red Hook Winter Farmers Market at the Elmendorph Inn tomorrow (Saturday, February 16). I’ll have my vegetarian and vegan morsels, Curried Butternut Squash Soup, Kale Soup with Potatoes & Lentils, and Grilled Cheese sandwiches w/Tomato Leather.

Hope to see you.

This fall I built my first real cold frame. I’ve made a couple of rather rough & tumble cold frames in previous years out of salvaged materials. These were moderately useful, but this time I actually purchased the materials all new. And unlike my previous cold frames, which I used just to start plants in the spring or for hardening off, this one I wanted to use on one of my raised beds to try to get some winter harvest.

Cold Frame

Of course I may be getting a bit ahead of things. For those of you unfamiliar with cold frames, a cold frame is essentially a mini-greenhouse that you can build on the ground or on a raised bed. Cold frames can be used to extend the growing season at either end of the season, to provide winter harvests, for seed starting, and for hardening off plants you started indoors.

The Hudson Valley Seed Library has a fairly good set of directions for building a cold frame on their site (in their blog post Seed-Starting 101: Part 4 of 6, March 11, 2010). I used their directions as a starting point for building my cold frame, but discovered some issues which I’ll pass on to you.

Frame Size

The Seed Library cold frame (CF) is meant to be put on the ground and is designed to be 4’ wide x 8’ long. I make, and recommend making, raised beds designed to have a planting area that’s 4’x10’ which means the frame is 4’3” x 10’3”.

The Seed Library plans call for using 2×2 lumber for making the frame for the CF lid. This works just fine if you’re making an 8 ft long frame, but the longest 2×2 board commercially available is 8 ft long, too short for my frame.

My beds are also too wide to efficiently use the clear polycarbonate panels the Seed Library directions recommend for the CF lid. These come in 8 ft lengths (by 26” wide), so cutting one in half gives the 4 ft width of the Seed Library CF covers. I could have cut the panels to width of my beds, but that would have meant throwing away almost half of each polycarbonate panel, both wasteful and expensive.

Using a 2×4 for the back edge of my cover frame solved the problem of the bed being too wide for the polycarbonate panels. Using a 2×4 meant the distance between the front and rear of the lid frame 46 1/2” giving me room to attach the lid covers to the lid frame.

Using 2×4s could also have solved the length problem, since 2×4s come in lengths longer than 8’. To make a front 2×2 for a frame longer than 8’, I could have cut another 2×4 down the middle, lengthwise, using my table or circular saw. Because I wanted to try out two different materials to cover the lid frame, I decided to make an 8’-long frame to cover most of the planting bed and a smaller one to cover the rest.

If you want to make your life easier you could just make a special bed or beds specifically for using with a cold frame(s) and be sure the outside dimensions are 4′x8′.

Frame Cover Material

As I mentioned above, Seed Library also recommends using SUNTUF polycarbonate panels, a wavy polycarbonate plastic product. No local store carries SUNTUF products any more. Lowes, where I bought my materials, doesn’t carry that brand anymore, but they have a similar product. At Home Depot, SUNTUF products can be ordered, but they’re not carried in the store nor is any similar product. It’s also possible to get flat polycarbonate (lexan/plexiglass) sheets at Williams. I used wavy material on the main cold frame lid and the flat type on the smaller frame, so I could see which I like better.

Cold Frame Cover Materials

The advantages of the wavy material are
1) Less expensive (though not by a lot especially when the cost of the insulating strips are added).
2) When getting snow off the lid you don’t hit the screws with your shovel, since the screws are in the troughs.
3) It’s easy to extend these panels past 8’ if needed.

Disadvantages
1) I had some trouble getting the individual sections (it takes 4 sections to cover an 8’ frame) to line up perfectly with each other.
2) The spaces between the wavy cover & frame are filled using a cheap foam material that’s somewhat difficult to use.
3) If the bottom of a trough doesn’t match exactly with the lid frame edges there are gaps that need to be filled in with caulk, weather stripping or a similar product.
4) Water can only flow off the cover in the direction of the troughs, while on the flat lexan it can flow off in two directions.

I’m still deciding which I like better, though I’m leaning toward the flat sheets. I’ll give you a final analysis in the spring.

Building Cold Frame Box for a Raised Bed

So I built the CF box according to the Seed Library directions, with a 2×8 board in front and a 2×12 in back. This difference in the height between the front and back of the CF is done both to allow better sun exposure of the covered bed and to allow water to drain off the lid.

When I put the frame on my raised be frame I noticed that almost the whole bed was in shade. A first I couldn’t understand why, but I realized I hadn’t accounted for the soil being 3” below the top of the raised bed frame.

I fixed the problem by using a 2×4 in front and a 2×8 in back. This gave me the proper slope for the cover and overall height for the frame, but didn’t block the sun. So if you’re building a CF for a raised bed, make sure you take into account the soil level.

Planting Timing

A cold frame will allow plants in it to survive for the winter, but it will still be too cold for the plants in the cold frame to grow much or at all. So if you really want to get a winter harvest you need to have the plants reach harvest size before it gets too cold. From what I’ve read, and seen in my cold frame this season, that means the plants need to be harvest size by late November.

This means most of the crops need to be planted in early to mid-October. This was a problem for me as all of my beds properly positioned for a cold frame still had other plants growing in them at this time. Therefore I had to wait and my plants are still only 1-2” tall and not ready for harvest (unless I want to use them as baby greens).

Inside my Cold Frame- January 2013

So for this year the main purpose of my cold frame will probably be to give me a very early spring harvest. For next year, I’ll plan for the cold frame bed to be planted with veggies that will be done by early October.

Cold Frame Temperature Control

I know these are called Cold Frames so you probably aren’t thinking you need to worry about it getting too hot in your cold frame. However, on an sunny, but still cold day, it’s entirely possible for the temperature inside the CF to get hot enough to kill your plants.

To keep this from happening the lid needs to be opened so the hot air can come out. You can do this manually by placing wood blocks between the main frame and the lid. I’ve also seen plenty of designs for other types of manual supports. The problem with manual support is if you forget to use the supports or a cloudy day turns sunny and the lid is closed the CF temp can get to high. Also if your CF is open and you’re away until after the sun goes down it can get too cold.

To deal with this problem you can install automatic lid openers. I know people who use these and they say the work very well. You need two per CF lid to be sure they can lift the lid. I use manual supports myself, because the lid openers are fairly expensive, and so far my plants seem to be OK.

One Last Thing

The Seed Library plans tell you to mitre (cut at 45 degree angles) the 2×2 boards used for the CF lid. I didn’t do this, nor do I see any reason to do so. If your carpentry skills are limited, as mine are, make your life easier and don’t mitre the boards.

I’m sure many of you, even those who have gardens, get some of your veggies during the growing season from local Farmers Markets. But did you know there are still Farmers Markets that continue into the winter? There are a number of them in our area including Red Hook, Saugerties, Rhinebeck and Kingston.

I’m a regular vendor at the Saugerties and Red Hook markets and both are coming up this weekend.

The Red Hook market is tomorrow, Saturday, December 15 from 10:00 am – 2:00 pm. It’s located at the Elmendorf Inn, the oldest building in Red Hook, which is right next to the former IGA Supermarket on Rt. 9 in Red Hook center.

The Saugerties market is on Sunday, December 16 from 12:00 pm – 4:00 pm and the Saugerties Senior Center next to Cantine Field.

At both markets I’ll be selling my Italian Vegggie Morsels, Seaweed Morsels & Miso Morsels. All are gluten-free, have some ingredients I grew in my own garden and the Seaweed & Miso flavors are vegan.

Italian Veggie-Morsels

You’ll also be able to purchase gift certificates for any of my Organic Gardening or Cooking Classes or for Garden consultations for the cooks and vegetable gardeners on your holiday gift list. Click here for more details.

Both markets also have lots of other great vendors & products.

At Red Hook you’ll find locally grown & produced organic & conventional fruits & vegetables, soaps, breads and pastries, wine, meats (including chicken, beef, & pork) and meat products (like sausage), eggs, and soups and sandwiches you can eat while at the market.

Saugerties has a similar mix for products on sale and also a number of craft vendors including folks who make baskets & yarns. For a more complete list of who’ll be at the Saugerties market, just click here and you’ll be taken right to their website. This is going to be an especially busy market with lots of great gift ideas for you.

Both markets will be continuing through the winter. Additional, dates are as follows:

Red Hook Farmers Market:
December 29, January 12 & 26, February 9 & 23, and March 9 & 23
There may also be dates in April. I’ll let you know, if so.

Saugerties Farmers Market:
January 13, February 10, & March 10

Just picked my last leeks and only have a little kale left, so with the 2012 growing season basically over it seems like a good time to assess the year. The good, the bad, and the ugly. It looks like this is going to take a number of posts so keep an eye out for more.

Cilantro

Cilantro can go to seed and still taste just as good as it does when it’s small. The leaves on most plants get bitter when they start to go to seed, but not cilantro. An advantage of allowing the plants to go to seed you wind up harvesting a ton of cilantro or you can plant less and still get the amount you want.

Cilantro- Gone to Seed

The leaves on the plant will change shape when the plan goes to seed but both types if leaves are OK to harvest.

Cilantro Leaves

If you want to preserve this bounty of cilantro the best way to do so is to chop it up in a food processor, stuff it into ice cube trays, and pour on a little water. Once frozen, just pop the cubes into a Ziploc or other freezer container. This method also works well for most herbs. It preserves the flavor better than drying, especially for subtle herbs like parsley.

Another advantage of letting the plants go to seed is to harvest the seed for future plantings or as a spice. The seed of cilantro is the spice known as Coriander, a staple spice in many Asian cuisines. When you’re harvesting the seed, a lot will fall into the garden and sprout later in the season giving you a second crop and some will probably sprout next year too. If you get enough seed, it makes a nice stocking stuffer, in little baggies or other small containers for the gardener or cook on your list.

If you let your cilantro go to seed, don’t let all of it do so. The plants get about 3 ft tall and are fairly bushy so they can shade out some of the smaller veggies you’re probably growing nearby. Whatever cilantro you allow to mature will need to be staked or given other support or they’ll flop all over the garden.

Finally, I discovered that Cilantro is quite frost-hardy. My fall crop had already survived a few mild frosts , when there was a frost predicted in the mid-20s. I ran out to the garden in the dark to rescue whatever cilantro I could. The next morning it was all frozen, but later in the day it thawed out and was fine and even survived a few more frosts.

Tomato Leather

As I mentioned in my last post, I tried making tomato leathers this fall to deal with another really good harvest (despite blossom-end rot and late blight problems- more on the latter later). I did it with all of my standard tomato recipes: Roasted Tomato Sauce, Salsa, BBQ sauce, and Tomato Paste.

The tomato sauce and tomato paste leathers are absolutely fantastic. The BBQ leather I haven’t really decided about and the salsa I probably won’t do again.

I use the tomato sauce leather on grilled cheese sandwiches and it’s amazing!

I also wanted some tomato sauce one day but didn’t have any unfrozen, so I just took some of the leather and reconstituted it with water.

I’ve used the tomato paste leather like sun-dried tomatoes or in dishes where tomato paste is called for. If using the leather like tomato paste, you either need to add some water to the recipes or add bits of leather into the dish when you’re sautéing the veggies so the leather can absorb some of the water being released.

Roasted Tomato Sauce Leather

To make a tomato leather you’ll need a dehydrator or convection oven with a “dehydrate” setting (that’s what I have). You can try a conventional oven set on it’s lowest setting but this may not work very well from what I’ve read. Prepare the recipe just as if you were canning or freezing. At the point when the recipe would be ready to put in jars or freezer containers, cover two of your dehydrator or convection oven pans with plastic wrap and pour the sauce evenly on top, spreading with a knife if you need to. Place the pans in your apparatus, turn it on and wait 12-18 hours, or until the sauce is dry to the touch and a bit stiff. If there’s a lot of oil in the recipe, like in my Roasted Tomato Sauce, the leather will be softer than other types. The trays for my oven are ~ 9”x12” so the 2 tray method is based on that size. If your trays are a different size, adjust accordingly.

According to the directions and my experience you can store the leathers at room temp. I had a bit of mold form on one leather (I just cut off that section and used the rest) but I think I just didn’t dry it enough. I’ve had the leathers at room temp for 2-3 months with only that one problem.

To store the leathers, I just roll them up in the plastic wrap (wrap side out) and place them in Ziploc bags. I discovered, however, if the tomato sauce leather is stored that way the oil will ooze out the sides and make a mess. So in that case I cut the leather into 8 sections (it the perfect size for my grilled cheese sandwiches), keeping it on the plastic wrap and then I lay it flat in a hard-sided storage container.

In the next post: My Cold-frame.

…Is what to do with all of them. You’ve probably been harvesting since mid-July and are getting tired of figuring out what to do with them.

Since you’ve probably got another month or so of tomato harvesting to come, here’s an idea, Cocktail Sauce. You know, what you dipped those shrimp in at the last wedding you attended. I found a recipe online and have modified it so it’s pretty zippy and quite good. Here it is.

I’ve set up the recipe with the intention that it be canned. However, if you don’t know how to can, the sauce could be frozen just as easily. If you freeze the sauce, don’t freeze it in glass as the jar could shatter as the sauce freezes.

I’ve also been experimenting with making tomato leathers (like those fruit rollups you had as a kid). I’ll let you know how they come out as I make them.

If you want to learn to can and preserve your harvest in other ways, I have a Food Preservation class coming up in October.

Hope to see you there.

I just got the following alert from a friend

“Late blight has been confirmed on tomato plants in Poughkeepsie. If you live within a 30 mile radius of Poughkeepsie, you may wish to consider using fungicides to protect your tomatoes and potatoes. This site has some very good photos of late blight on tomato plants. Fungicide recommendations can be found in this Cornell fact sheet.”

For those of you who were gardening in 2009, you’ll remember what a disaster this disease can be. For those of you who weren’t, this is the disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine. It affects both potatoes and tomatoes and kills them very quickly. The disease is not curable once the plant has it, you can only prevent your plants from getting the disease.

Prevention can be done using what are called cultural methods including pruning, watering at ground level, watering in the middle of the day, and spacing the plants widely. All of these things will helps plant leaves dry off quickly which will tend to discourage the disease. There are fungicides that can also be used, some of which are listed in the article linked above. If you are trying to grow your vegetables organically, you’ll need to use either one of the copper products or one containing Bacillus subtilis.

Following up on my recent Colorado Potato Beetle post, here’s a picture of the feeding behavior I mentioned. The larvae are a bit out of focus, but trust me, they’re CPB larvae. While this is their most common feeding habit, you can also find the larvae singly, or in small groups and on the top or bottom of leaves. So if you don’t anything like the picture below, don’t assume you got all of the larvae.

Colorado Potato Beetle Feeding Behavior

Also, I took this picture on an eggplant so if you’re growing eggplant you need to check for the eggs & larvae on them, too.

Just in the last couple of days I’ve also spotted a number of other common pests.

Squash bugs (SB)

These can do a lot of damage and can be a bit hard to identify after they hatch because they look very different at various life stages. However, their eggs are quite distinctive.

Squash Bug Egg Cluster

The eggs can be removed and crushed as with the Colorado Potato Beetle eggs, but squash bug eggs stick to the leaves a lot harder and I often have to tear small pieces of leaf off to get all the eggs. While this isn’t ideal, its a lot less damage than the squash bugs will do.

Immature (left) & Adult (right) Squash Bug Appearance

Squash Vine Borer (SVB)

I hate this bug more than just about any of the others. Before I learned about it, it destroyed a couple of entire squash harvests. It’s the larva of a moth, which lays its eggs at squash nodes (squash nodes? what the #&%$* are squash nodes? I hear you cry.) which when they hatch burrow inside the stem and eat their way up the stem. This kills all of the plant past where the infestation occurs.

The way squashes grow is that the stem grows for a few inches and then at one spot a leaf, a flower, and various other structures will/can grow, This area  is called a node.

Butternut Squash Node with Adventious Roots

Since the SVB adult plants it eggs at the nodes, you can bury the nodes with dirt which means the adult doesn’t know there’s node there and won’t lay eggs.

Buried Butternut Squash Node

Now it’s hard to bury every node, but you don’t need to because when you bury the nodes it encourages the growth of new roots from the stem. If your plant does develop these adventitious roots in a number of spots then if part of the plant dies because of SVBs the the roots further up can take over and the plant survives. Notice I didn’t bury the node so deeply that I covered up the developing flower (the spiky thing in the middle just above the dirt). You just want to cover up the stem enough to confuse the SVB adult.

Even if you’ve never had problems I strongly suggest burying nodes. Since the borer is inside the stem it’s hard to notice the bug until the plant starts showing real damage and at then it could be too late to get the adventitious roots to grow.

I don’t have good picture of SVB damage at the moment, but hope to have one ready for you soon.

Colorado Potato Beetles have appeared. This is a pest that can easily decimate your potato crop. However, they are relatively easy to control. As taken from a very thorough website I found…

“…the Colorado potato beetle is also a concern for home gardeners.  When [a] garden is limited to a few potato, tomato, or eggplant plants, hand-picking overwintered adults and egg masses early in the season is the simplest management approach. Most damage is done by larvae, so removing their parents and unhatched eggs [by hand] should provide fairly good protection of the plants later in the season. It is no more time-consuming than other gardening practices, does not require expensive purchased inputs, and environmentally friendly. It can also be a relaxing and somewhat therapeutic experience – after all, from the biological point of view we have evolved to be hunters and gatherers, not computer programmers or hedge fund managers.  The picking should be done for several weeks because overwintered beetles [emerge and lay eggs] over approximately one-month time window.”

Colorado Potato Beetle Eggs

As you can see the eggs are fairly easy to see, although they are on the underside of the leaves so you do have to turn the leaves over to check. I especially like to remove the eggs before they hatch because then there’s no damage, but also the larvae are really gross.

Colorado Potato Beetle Larvae

I’ve seen some that actually seem to put their feces on their backs as a deterrent to predators. When I find hatched larvae I just prune off the whole leaf they’re on. Luckily, the larvae all stay together as a group (at least on the leaf they hatch on) so they’re easy to see.

Cabbage Worms

I’m a little late with this alert, but Cabbage worms are still around, so keep an eye out for them. You can find them on any member of the cabbage family (Broccoli, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Kale, Mustard, Radish, Turnip, Rutabaga) but I find them most commonly on Broccoli, Cabbage & Kale.

Cabbage worm egg

You can rub the eggs of the leaves before they hatch or remove the caterpillars by hand after they hatch. The eggs are very small (see picture) and usually, though not always, found on the underside of leaves.

Cabbage worms

If you don’t want to kill the caterpillars, you can just throw them a good distance away from the plants and they can’t make it back to the plants. Cabbage worms will  have a second generation later in the summer, usually around mid-August, and you can prevent any eggs from being laid by placing row covers over the plants. This prevents the adult moths from getting to the plants and is very effective.

Cilantro

I’ve always enjoyed cilantro as an herb and it’s an important ingredient in the salsa I make, but it’s always been a somewhat frustrating plant for me. One problem has been that it goes to seed (when a plant starts to form flowers and eventually seeds) very quickly. This seemed to be a problem because when many plants they start to go to seed the leaves get bitter. This year I decided to taste the leaves and found they taste just the same as the normal leaves.  One problem solved

Cilantro Leaves

Also, I haven’t had good luck getting it to mature at the time I need it for my salsa. Herbs can be frozen so I decided to do so with my cilantro. You just chop up the cilantro in a food processor, press it into ice cube trays, and pour just a little bit of water over each cube. One advantage of allowing cilantro to go to seed is it gets much bigger than when it’s usually harvested, so I even wound up with more cilantro than usual.

Cilantro- after going to seed

I’ve also had spotty germination of cilantro in my garden. However, last year some of my cilantro went to seed and I let some of the seed fall into the garden (I saved some seeds to grind use in recipes where it’s known as coriander) where it stayed over the winter and germinated in large numbers this spring. I’ve also seen this happen in other gardens (works with dill, too), so I’ve solved one of my problems.

Watering

How much and when to water seems to be one of the things people I talk to are most likely to be confused about. Most commonly people seem to think watering for a few minutes every day is what plants need. When you water for a short time the water stays in the top layer of soil and so do the roots. This mean the plants are much more susceptible to drying out.

What you want to do is water for long periods of time and fairly infrequently. I generally water my beds for about 30 minutes at-a-time. This sends the water deep into the beds and they roots go deep to follow it. What I get is a much stronger root system which is less easy to dry out and means I only need to water 2-3 times per week.

Standing in front of a garden holding a hose for 30 minutes at a time is probably more than most people want to do. Therefore, setting up automatic watering works out much better and is another advantage of using soaker hoses or a drip irrigation system.

Raised beds need to be watered somewhat more often in ground beds.

I’ve also found gardeners usually think morning or evening is the best time to water. The rationale being in the middle of the day wet leaves will burn or that water will evaporate too quickly. In fact, mid-day is the best time to water. This way you minimize the length of time the leaves are wet, helping to prevent diseases. Also, mid-day is when plants need the water the most. Generally, you want to water after dew has evaporated in the morning and early enough for water that gets on the leaves to evaporate before evening. Most often this means watering between 10 am and 4 pm.