Lettuce Have Breakfast

Picked the first lettuce leaves of the season today. They really shot up after all the rain we had this week. I don't have a pic of the garden because it is raining, but here's the maple sausage biscuit & jack cheeze sandwich my husband just ate with fresh buttercrunch. Yum!

Umm, so it's been a year....

I've been gardening, just not blogging. I do still find my blog useful occasionally though, so I'd like to try to keep it a little more up to date.

For instance, this week I noticed my chive plants were finally blooming. I thought for sure they were about a month late, and I remembered that two years ago I'd kept notes on harvest times. So I looked back at that list, but lo and behold, they were right on time. Amazing how your memory can be so wrong!

I'm still living in the same home, although hoping to move. For a variety of reasons, we just haven't put the house up for sale yet. My son is now 2.5 and keeping us busy. Therefore, I'm continuing to go light on gardening and trying to keep things simple.

Here's a few pics I've managed to take so far this spring.

On March 31st I had my first harvest: some baby chives that I used on potato salad for our Easter dinner. They really put this humdrum side dish over the top!

     

And this is my strawberry bed on April 21st. Unfortunately you can only see 2 strawberry plants, and the rest are romaine and buttercrunch lettuces that I'd just planted. The triple digit heatwaves last summer burnt my poor strawberries to a crisp, and this is all that came back. Compared to this photo from 2010 it really is so sad. Hopefully they'll survive and send out some runners for next year. 

I also planted a few flowers in the back, along with some wild violets I'd successfully transplanted from our lawn last summer. 

That's it. Not very exciting, but at least it is something! We'll see how much I can blog the rest of the season.

July Harvests

I feel really bad about neglecting my blog all summer! I can't believe it has flown by so quickly. We've had lots of fun taking K. to the beach, boardwalk, hiking, and swimming in the pool.

Unfortunately the garden was not as great as all that. It was another relatively unlucky year, with a 106 degree heatwave killing the blackberries again, a gopher devouring all my green beans and cucumbers, blight on the tomatoes, mislabeled peppers, carrots choked out by weeds and now I've even got poison ivy but can't identify where it is in the yard. Yeesh! Lately I've felt like plowing it all under and replacing it with sod! Of course I'm not going to do that, but I may downsize to just one side of the yard. We'll see how I feel.

In any case, here is a photo roundup of pretty much everything I harvested in July. At least there was something, I guess!

 Albino Peppers

 Little Dickens and Cubanelle Peppers

 Tiny Jalapeno's (Supposed to be Grandpa's Favorite)

 Very Spiny Cool Breeze Cucumbers (All I got before Gophocalypse)

 Genovese Basil

 Aunt Mollie's Ground Cherries

 Napoli Carrots & Gold Ball Turnips

Good ol Purple Top Turnips

A Berry Delicious Harvest

Last year it seemed the heatwaves killed off most of my strawberry patch. But I was wrong! To my great delight, we had quite a good harvest this year. To the left is the 1st ripe strawberry, picked on May 20th.



Then over the next two weeks I picked all of these (and another bowl, but the picture is still on my camera):

I ate them in several delicious salads and a heavenly chocolate breakfast. Details and recipes will follow soon in another post.

First Harvest of 2011

Today I picked a bunch of mache that self-seeded when I let a few plants go to seed last spring. Here they all are in the bed:

And close up:

Unfortunately I think they've already started to bolt. You can see the middle leaves are starting to get taller - that's going to shoot up into a seed stalk pretty soon. They were probably at their peak in March, but I missed it. So, I picked a bunch today and made a salad with mandarin oranges, walnuts and raspberry vinaigrette.

This was the first time I ever ate mache, even though I grew it last year. (I totally missed the harvest window then since I had no idea they'd go to seed so quickly) It was delicious! The taste was very light and delicate. I can see why this green is also called lamb's lettuce - it evoked softness and spring.

I picked some chard and arugula that self-seeded too, and sauteed them with garlic and lemon. We had that as a side to whole wheat angel hair with white bean sauce. I'm not going to post pics of those, since that's pretty basic and look just like the chard & arugula I've posted here before. But it sure was nice to have fresh greens with no gardening work on my part at all!

2010 Retrospective: Diva Cucumbers

You might remember the crazy rowcover structure I stuck to the fence with velcro, described back in this post. It resulted in decent protection. Above you can how the diva cucumber plants looked as of August 4, 2010. That's pretty good considering my cucumbers were a yellow spotted, shriveling up, powdery mildewed mess by Aug. 9th in 2009. There were just two major problems: 1) the Agribon didn't stick to the velcro very well, so even after I tried stapling it, it was tough to peel the cover off for harvest without ripping the velcro from the fabric and 2) I think some especially intrepid cucumber beetles were able to get to the plants through cracks in the fence. Still, it was good enough protection that the plants stayed healthy for a longer time. I was a bit disappointed with the Diva's production though - I probably picked less than 10 cucumbers, even with 4 plants. This year I'm going to try sewing the velcro to the Agribon with a wide zig zag stich, and plant Cool Breeze cucumbers. We'll see if they're any better.

Here is one of the cucumbers I harvested, along with some other garden veggies & berries picked that day. When they did grow, they were great! Really smooth and not bitter at all.

I made it into one of my favorite summer dishes - cold peanut soba noodles. I also shredded the carrots and turnips from the garden in it too. Turnips are suprisingly sweet when shredded raw!

Turnip Harvest Even Better This Year

I thought last year's turnips were pretty spectacular, but this year they really outdid themselves! I left my finger in the picture for size comparison. Just look at the size of these!!

I only harvested the biggest ones that day. It was June 12th. There are still quite a few nice sized ones left in the bed for later - I'd say this was maybe a little over 1/3 of the bed. I think I'll pick them in the next week or two before they get too woody and bitter in all of this heat. The ones pictured above tasted great steamed and mashed with potatoes.

Sugar Snap Pea Harvest

The sugar snap harvest was pretty successful this year, I guess as far as it goes with the short springs here that get hot so quickly.

Above is the first harvest I got from the peas that were interplanted with trombocino squash in full sun. I picked them on June 12th, and pulled the plants out that same day because they already had started turning brown. Plus I wanted to give more room to the squash as soon as possible.That same day I picked these from the other side of the yard. Since these plants were in part shade, they hadn't yet started turning brown. There were a lot more peas on the vines but they hadn't plumped up yet so I left them in to grow some more and see how much longer they'd last.

This is the second batch harvested from those plants on June 20th. There are some more peas left on the vines that need picking as of today, but June was really hot this year so even these vines are half brown now too. So that's pretty much it for peas 2010.

Edible Flowers and Herbs

The herbs are growing like crazy! The chive, sage, lavender, chamomile and thyme have all bloomed, and it looks like the oregano and marjoram will too any day now. I need to trim them and dehydrate a bunch, but I just haven't had a chance yet.

I did harvest some of the flowers though. To the left is a bouquet of sage flowers. I'm not sure what to do with them, but they sure look pretty and smell good!

I also picked some lavender, chive and dianthus flowers. I dried the lavender to save for tea later. The chives made their way onto baked potatoes and salads. Below is a picture of the chives and dianthus sprinkled on a regular garden salad. Unfortunately it was at night, and the lighting isn't the best. But you can see how pretty the petals are - it really made an average salad look beautiful! And I love the mild oniony taste of the chive flowers. The dianthus was delicious too - a slight spicy, yet floral taste. (there's also some of the home grown radishes in this salad too)

 

More Strawberries!

I can't even believe this harvest!! I got these two bunches, and then another four cups worth that I still have to eat.







It looks like the plants are slowing down now - mostly just the smaller everbearing types are left. But there are definitely still some ripe ones that I need to pick tomorrow...

Radish Harvest

I didn't plant a lot of radishes this year. I thought I'd do a second batch but never got around to it. That's ok, I still got a decent harvest. They weren't nearly as big as last year though. I guess all the rain last year must have made the roots grow big. Here's the first batch I picked on May 9th - 3 Easter Egg in the top row, then I think a mix of Crimson Red and Sparkler White Tip:Then I picked the rest on May 15th to make room for the tomatoes and peppers. These are all the Easter Eggs:And the rest of the Crimson Reds and White Tips:
Hopefully I'll have the time to plant another crop in the fall.

Strawberry Harvest!

I didn't think they'd be ripe until June, but here are the first 4 ripe berries of the season. We ate these beauties on top of a nice tall stack of chocolate chip pancakes outside in the garden, with my favorite drink, a (vegan) NY Egg Cream. :-)Then, just a day later I picked about 8 more, but ate them before I took a picture. After it stopped raining for two days, I was able to pick this whole plateful. It doesn't look like much, but I'm really excited since this is the most strawberries I've ever harvested at once! It was enough for me and my partner to share for dessert. I can't wait until the next batch is ripe - there are still plenty more on the plants.

More Autumn Garden Leftovers

Remember these Acorn Squash? They were an accident in my garden this summer, since I thought I bought yellow summer squash but apparently it was labeled incorrectly. Eventually, I realized, hey! these are acorn squash!

The plant grew HUGE! It was way too much for my small garden, as you can see above. Then, to top it all off, evil Squash Vine Borers decimated the plant in August.

The good news is, as you can see from the picture on the left, the squash were mostly ripe. I picked around a dozen of these.

Two or three of them had those weird scratch marks on them, so I didn't eat those. But the rest had at least a good patch of yellow, so I figured they were ripe enough to save.

Of course, in the middle of summer, I had no idea what to do with them - 90 degrees with high humidity is not exactly roasted veggie soup time.

So instead of eating them then, I gave a few away and roasted the rest, then froze them.

I finally made soup with it the day after Thanksgiving. It was super easy - I just poured the frozen pieces of roasted squash into a pot with the leftover Imagine No-Chicken broth that we used for the stuffing the day before. Then I added some fresh rosemary, thyme and red hot pepper flakes. S & P to taste, pureed with an immersion blender and voila! delicious creamy soup. It really was tasty!


A few days later I added nutritional yeast to the leftover soup and poured it over whole wheat spaghetti mixed with spaghetti squash as a kind of cheesy-ish sauce. I didn't take a picture of that one, b/c I'll admit, it wasn't very beautiful. But sometimes, ugly things taste great! My partner wouldn't touch it b/c he doesn't like squash, but to me, it was delicious! I love squash, any and all kinds.

I still have about 2/3 of a bag left in the freezer, so I'll definitely be making this soup again in the cold winter months.

Happy Thankgiving!

I'm so happy that my rowcovers seem to be working so far. Just look how lush and green the plants are underneath! Granted, it hasn't been that cold yet - after that one period of frost that killed the peppers, squash and tomatoes, it has been pretty warm since. Still, I think it is helping, and I can't wait to see how long they will stay green. Above you can see the bed with carrots, turnips & a little bit of chard along the sides.
Here is the leafy green bed, with mustard greens, arugula, red romaine & buttercrunch lettuce, and mache. I'm really excited about the mache, since it is supposed to be the one green that will last through winter. It looks really healthy under the rowcover. I can't wait to eat it, but I'm trying to hold out until it gets really cold. Here's a closeup of the mache, which is growing all along the front of the bed:

I harvested a variety of goodies from these beds for today's Thanksgiving feast. The pictures aren't great because by the time I got home from work, it quickly got dark, and on top of that it was raining. But I still had fun out there picking the veggies. The Frech innovation described in Coleman's book - using the ropes - really does make it super easy to get in and out. All I had to do was push the cover back - I didn't even need to untie it. Then just slid it back down when I was done. Here's what I got:
This was maybe about 1/3 of the carrots growing under the rowcover. They're still a bit small, but not too dissapointing. I figure this harvest was about equivalent to a bag of baby carrots, just a lot better tasting and no chlorine involved. :-)
Unfortunately, most of the turnips were still too small to harvest, so this was all I got. The rest of them looked like these four on the left in the picture below.I think it may be because I did a crappy job of planting them back in August, since it was a miserably hot day. I hope what's left under the rowcover grows more (there is still a lot). Worst comes to worst, at least I can eat the greens.
I also picked a ton of arugula. I only have a picture of it packed up and ready to transport to my mom's house. Here is everything ready to go. Starting from the top left, moving clockwise I've got :





-Arugula
-Turnip Greens
-Green Pepper
-Kung Pao & Jalapeno Chili Powder
-Turnips & Baby Carrots
-Nasturtium Lemon Butter
-Thyme, Rosemary & Edible Marigolds







I'll update the blog with everything I made from it later.

Hope everyone enjoys their thanksgiving and has a wonderful day!

Final Haul on a Frosty November Morning

Turns out it already frosted last night. I went out bright and early this morning to pick as much as I could before work, and discovered a light frost on everything. Above you can see it on the nasturtiums, already starting to melt in the sun around 7:30 AM. And here is even more on the shady side of the garden:
Considering last night was only expected to go down to 42 degrees or so, and tonight is supposed to go down to 35 - I'm pretty sure we'll get a killing frost tonight. So I desperately picked and picked this morning. Here's the haul so far - not pictured is a huge bowl of kung pao peppers, and I still haven't gotten to any of the edible flowers or herbs. I can't wait to make green tomato salsa, relish, and fried green tomatoes. Yum. Clockwise from the top left: (yellow bowl) red grape tomatoes, (tupperware) jalapenos, (counter) bell peppers, (blue bowl) Roma tomatoes, (pink bowl) yellow grape tomatoes and (silver bowl) Rutger's tomatoes:
It was actually quite lovely out there this morning, once I dragged myself out from under the warm fuzzy covers. The sun was beautiful, streaming through the frosty air. It was a very enjoyable way to start the day. Too bad I'm always so sleepy and can't haul myself out of bed earlier to have breakfast out there every morning!