Harvest Monday: Garlic!

On Friday night I decided I start digging up my garlic. I was extremely excited to find bulbs almost the size of my hand.

This particular variety is Music, and I purchased it from Territorial Seed. I'll have plenty of my own for seed this year. I harvested about 30 heads on Friday, and then decided to let the ground dry out just a bit more and finished on Saturday night. All in all, I got about 70 heads of garlic, and they're all hanging in a shady corner of my garage to cure. We won't have any vampires sneaking into the garage any time soon.

Green beans have been coming in just a bit every day, and I've gotten broccoli about every other day (either a head or a side shoot). They've made excellent side dishes for my burgers topped with peach salsa (made with garden jalapenos and cilantro). 

On Friday, I harvested the first zucchini just in time for lunch. It joined green beans as a side for a sloppy joe (which contains green peppers and onion from the garden).

While all these harvests look delicious, I've been battling Japanese beetles in the garden. First they were on my green beans, and within days they spread to the basil and zinnias. On the advice of a local CSA farmer, I've sprayed the affected plants with neem oil. Hopefully that takes care of them.

To see what other gardeners are harvesting, check out Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions.

Weekend Work: We Have Apple Trees!

I went to the local garden center to pick up two bags of potting mix on Saturday. That was all I needed. But then, beckoning to me from the row behind the potting soil, was a sign that read "Fruit Trees On Sale." I poked around, saw some stuff I liked, and then went to the cash register. And when I got there, I turned around and went back to the trees. They were a pretty good deal, and they had some interesting varieties. I called my husband (who was out of town), didn't get him, and left a message. I checked out with my two bags of potting soil and left the garden center.

After driving two blocks, he texted me. He said we should definitely buy two apple trees for the front yard. So I turned around, grabbed two trees, and managed to fit them in my car. I was highly motivated (and had to take the back roads home so I wouldn't damage the trees).

This isn't a great picture, but nothing was going to keep me from getting those trees home.

I ended up with a Snow Sweet and Honeycrisp. They're both planted in the front yard, which happens to meet our HOA requirement of having two trees in front. No one said they couldn't produce a crop! I've never grown apples, and haven't really done much research about them ... so if you have any advice, feel free to share in the comments!

Prior to going to the garden center, I accomplished another gardening task—I put together the large greenhouse my father in law gave us. We only had two small 3-shelf greenhouses, and I figured this would give us all the space we need. Well, it's already full! If I don't start seedlings for friends in future years, I think it will meet our needs.

I took some photos of the garden on Friday after work. Even though the majority of the garden isn't planted yet, there's still a lot going on!

The garlic is looking great! All but one clove came up this spring, and one shot up two stalks, so I got exactly what I planted (the extra stalk will be harvested as spring garlic so it can have sufficient space to form a head).

My mammoth peas are finally doing something! The second round that was seeded a few weeks after this one isn't far behind.

What a beautiful strawberry blossom! Unfortunately, I had to pluck it. We're not letting the strawberries form fruit this year, so all their energy will go into developing strong plants that will hopefully last for years (and produce even more berries next year).

Asparagus is "look but don't touch" this year. Thankfully, every crown has produced shoots, and some of them are a few feet tall already. We planted two-year crowns, so next year we can harvest them for a few weeks.

Other tasks: I pulled a few weeds, planted fava beans, transplanted celery for friends, made my first seedling sale to a friend, and Aaron planted two landscaping bushes in the front of the house (unfortunately, they will not produce a harvest). There was a harvest from the garden, but I'll save that for Harvest Monday.

Compost, Garlic & Hoops

I spent a solid 3.5 hours working in the garden, assisted most of the time by my wonderful husband. The first order of business was to improve the compost pile. We're pretty lazy composters, and recently the neighbor complained that our compost smelled. The cause was pretty clear - we had way too many "greens" in the compost (kitchen scraps, spent grain from brewing, etc.) and not enough "browns" (leaves, grass clippings, other dead plant matter).

I gathered two garden cart-fulls of leaves from the front yard, dragged them to the back yard compost bin, and mixed it into our current compost. Later I added another cart-full of leaves just for good measure.

In the meantime, Aaron prepared the garlic bed. I try to avoid tilling whenever possible so we can have some nice, fluffy soil full of worms...which means prepping a bed is hard work. I did help, a little. We sifted 12 buckets of finished compost to add to the bed, which I then raked in and smoothed the soil. Time for the garlic! Last year I planted 3 rows in my 4' x 16' beds. I realized I could have planted them closer together, and I finalized that decision after seeing that Daphne planted her garlic in a 6" grid. Fun fact: The holes in the leftover trellis material sitting in our garage are exactly 3" apart—perfect spacers!

Last year I planted about 95 cloves of garlic (and I think I paid about $40 for the seed), and I'm quite sure I won't have enough to get us through until next year's harvest. So, I planted 119 cloves this year (trying to strike a balance between planting more but leaving some for our use). I chose the largest cloves from last year's harvest. The Music cloves are amazing - I planted 63 of those. The Spanish Roja are much less impressive, but since I had them, I planted 56 cloves. Because I planted in a grid instead of in rows, I managed to use about half as much space, even though I planted about 20% more than last year.

The difference in the soil quality between last year and this year is remarkable. Last year I had to dig holes and shove the garlic cloves into the cold earth in between clods of clay soil. This year, I could push the cloves a few inches into the soil and cover them without tools in most cases. The compost has been doing its job :)

To finish, I brought another cart-full of leaves from the front yard, crunched them up a bit, and used them to mulch the garlic. Aaron watered it in, and now we'll just sit back and wait for spring.

Also, Aaron bought some 7mil plastic to put over our bed of chard, carrots and beets. This is our first year using hoops, so it's really just an experiment - but I'll be very excited if I can harvest chard throughout the winter, and carrots and beets in early spring.

Garden Lessons

The garden season is not entirely over (it better not be - there are a lot of green tomatoes on my plants), but I've gotten through enough of it to reflect on things I want to do differently next year. Some of my readers who are more experienced gardeners may say "duh," but this is only my third year of gardening (fourth if you include containers). Hopefully, I have about 50 years of gardening ahead of me. My husband has urged me to write these things down so I don't have the same frustrations next year.

We need to learn how to deal with pests.

Whether flying, crawling, or scampering, this year's mild winter has made every pest invasion more extreme. There are a variety of measures I can take to keep the pests out of my garden.

• Dig our chicken wire barrier down into the ground.
• Last year, when I put up the chicken wire along our chain link fence that encloses the garden, I didn't dig it into the ground. I knew I should have, but we had already felled 4 trees, added 4 large beds, hauled in garden soil, and constructed a serious trellis/gate. I needed to get plants in the ground, not dig in the chicken wire—or so I thought. The ground-level barrier worked for a year, but this year I've seen mice and chipmunks running free through the garden. They've definitely learned to burrow. Either this fall or early next spring, we're going to have to invest some serious sweat equity - digging in approximately 125 feet of chicken wire.
• Invest in some hoops and cover fabric.
• If the mice do end up getting in, I don't want to let them have my beet harvest again. I know the hoops aren't 100% necessary, but I think I'd like to have them to extend the growing season anyway. I wish I would have purchased some immediately after I discovered the devastation in the beet patch - the entire fall bed (beets, chard, turnips) has had all of its leaves eaten by some type of critter. I dont' think it's going to make it. Hopefully this covering will also keep our plants protected from the bugs that infested our garden this year - at least until they're established enough to need pollinating.
• Figure out how to outsmart the slugs.
• We've tried beer traps. We've tried treating with Sluggo (maybe not frequently enough?) The fact is slugs are still decimating many of our crops. They seem to love our soil, and I need to find a way to get rid of them.
• Pay more attention to my summer squash and cucumbers, and Aaron's hops.
• I think these need to be sprayed much more often than we did (we use pyrethrin). That, or I need to plan to have two rotations of these plants so I have more maturing after the first planting is lost to the bugs.

We need to make better use of our available space.

• After harvesting the early bed, most of it stayed empty (except 4 rows of pole beans on 2 trellises) because it was too late to plant the melons I had planned for that bed. I could have, however, planted more summer squash in that space—it would have started producing fruit right as we started severely cutting back our powdery-mildew and squash vine borer infested leaves and stems.
• Some things can be planted closer together (garlic), while others need to be farther apart (onions, tomatoes, beets).
• I need to give up on planting in the ground on the back fence line (it's overrun with weeds from all the neighbors) and add a few smaller raised beds back there. They'll be perfect for determinant tomatoes, bush beans, or smaller root veggies like beets and turnips.

I need to build better tomato cages.

• I have these great tomato cages that store flat (they're made up of 3 poles and 9 connectors/supports each), but I consistently assemble them backwards. I face the supports the wrong way, so as the plant grows it busts out of the cages. Simply snapping on the supports facing the correct direction will fix this problem—yet I've managed to screw it up for 2 years.

I've got to make the basil last.

• Believe it or not, I think this means planting less of it. I have a tendency to plant too much basil, which results in my inability to keep up with harvests and the premature yellowing of the plants. I need to be ruthless when I harvest so the regrowth continues until the tomatoes are all ripe.
• Related - when I have a glut of basil, I need to make pesto, even if there is a bunch in the freezer. I'm looking at a pesto-free winter because I didn't make pesto in June when I should have.

It's time to start identifying my preferred varieties.

• This is most important for me in regards to the plants I grow a lot of and put up for the winter—tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, zucchini, garlic.
• Tomatoes: I started growing exclusively heirloom tomatoes because it seemed the most authentic type to grow. Don't get me wrong - they're delicious. But, I need a large portion of my tomatoes to be suitable for canning. Most of the heirlooms I grow are delicious slicers, but they don't put out the volume to give me enough for canning.
• This was the first year I grew some determinant varieties, and Polbig (an early hybrid) is definitely a keeper. It put out tons of fist-sized tomatoes that are perfect for canning, sauce, salsa, etc.
• Blondkopfchen, an heirloom cherry tomato, is definitely a keeper. It takes longer to ripen than some other cherries, but its huge clusters give me an enormous amount of tomatoes at once - they're perfect for roasting, fresh eating, and soon I hope to give them a try in my newly-purchased dehydrator.
• Moonshine is my favorite slicer, so that heirloom will still find a place in my garden.
• Amish Paste, however, is on its way out. The huge tomatoes would be great, except they always split on me, and I end up cutting off way to much to get rid of the damaged parts. Also, I only get a few ripe tomatoes a day - not enough at once to put up anything of consequence.
• Matt's Wild Cherry tastes delicious, but it sprawls way too much for me (the plant is so tall I can't pick the highest clusters) and it annoys me that the fruits seem to ripen in a set order on the cluster - those closest to the stem ripen much faster than the fruits at the end of the cluster. This means more time spent picking, as you can only pick one or two fruits from each cluster at a time. I appreciated that they ripened the earliest, though - so I'm on the hunt for another early-ripening cherry tomato.
• Heinz was on trial in my garden this year, and it will probably get another year. The fruits are small, but they take longer than the Polbig's to ripen, meaning I have an extended canning/preserving season.
• According to this list, I might end up with only 5 or 6 tomato varieties each year (assuming I try something new every year). I need to realize that that's ok. I've got lots of other fish (veggies?) to fry.
• Beans
• I've only been growing beans for 2 years, but I've learned a variety of lessons. 1) Don't plant a double row in front of the trellis - the leaves will grow so thick you'll never find the beans! 2) Don't freak out about getting them in the ground as soon as we're clear of the last frost. Better for them to get a start to grow healthy stems than to be set back by cold, wet weather. 3) I need to stagger my bean planting. This year I planted up until July and I think I'll get everything harvested before the first frost.
• Ideal Market tastes delicious, but it's hard to find in the mess of beans. I'm going to stick with beans that have some sort of color to them so they're easier to pick.
• Using that criteria, I think Rattlesnake and Purple Trionfo Violetto are keepers.
• I'm going to actually grow my pole beans on poles (teepees) next year. The beautiful trellises my father in law makes keep getting blown over in the wind.
• I'll likely try growing edamame again next year, although every single seed failed to come up this year.
• I'll need another year of trials on growing dry beans. The bugs and slugs were so ruthless this year, they didn't get a fair shot.
• Cucumbers
• Actually labeling my cucumbers will likely help me determine which ones I like :) I had a hard time with germination this year, then ended up planting them way too close together. Next year will be better. My husband loves pickles, so I need to plant a lot of pickling cucs and just a few slicers.
• Zucchini & Summer Squash
• I'll probably just stick with black beauty and yellow summer squash. They're solid producers, I can freeze a bunch, and they're easy to process.
• Garlic
• This was the first year of growing garlic, so it won't actually be until the fall 2013 planting that I can make intelligent choices based on their storage qualities. However, based on what I've seen from our Music variety and what I've heard about its storage qualities, it's a keeper. In fact, it might be the only one I plant this fall. We'll see.

I'm sure there's more......but there are another 6 weeks left in the garden season to get it all out of my head and onto the blog, right?

Harvest Monday: July 23, 2012 - Garlic!

The standard harvest this week focused around zucchini, cucumbers, and a handful of cherry tomatoes. I harvested my first papaya squash on Saturday (not pictured).

Although it was harvested over a month ago, tonight we finally trimmed and cleaned our garlic. The harvest is quite impressive. We started with this:

and ended up with this:

Music (3 lbs 5.25 ounces)

Spanish Roja (2 lbs 6 ounces)

I'm very impressed with my first-ever garlic harvest. We have plenty to eat for the year, and to plant for next year!

Thursday's Kitchen Cupboard - July 5, 2012

It's the summer of jam.

I haven't been good about blogging about the jams and jellies I've been canning, but I've definitely been busy making them! So far this summer I've put up strawberry and peach jam, as well as basil and garlic scape jelly. I've made sweet jams for three years now, but this will be my first year attempting savory jellies. I see many cheese and cracker appetizers in my future, or maybe savory thumbprint cookies.

Strawberries

First, strawberry jam. I made a dozen half-pint jars, and basically used the recipe on the container of low/no-sugar pectin I purchased, with the exclusion of lemon juice (the Ball canning book didn't call for it, so I felt safe). I only used half a cup of sugar for every two cups of crushed berries, and this is by far the most delicious jam I've made yet. I only have eight jars left after sharing some of the deliciousness.

The crushed berries separated from the juice...but I can deal with that.

Peaches

Next, I made peach jam. My mom tipped me off to a traveling truck that brings tree-ripened peaches from Georgia to the upper midwest. I had never worked with peaches before, and I'm glad my husband was kind enough to help me blanch, peel, and slice the peaches. We ended up with seven quarts of frozen peaches for pies or smoothies, and 10 jelly jars of jam. I don't think I've ever had peach jam before, but I must say - it's delicious. I wish I would have doubled the recipe so I'd have 10 half-pint jars.

This is what half a bushel of peaches looks like.

I used the recipe from the Ball canning book.

There were plenty of peaches left for fresh eating, and this delicious peach cobbler.

Basil

Next, I found myself with a glut of basil well before the tomatoes (or any other summer veggies) were ready to harvest. I decided to take a foray into the land of savory jams. I used a Taste of Home recipe, although because I was using low/no-sugar pectin, I only used two cups of sugar. Even then, this jam seems overly sweet. I got nine jelly jars (one went home with my parents). I haven't tried it since it set.

Garlic Scapes

Even though I've already harvested my garlic, I'd been saving the garlic scapes for a day when I had time to make the recipe I read a few weeks ago on Gardener of Eden. Again, I modified the recipe slightly. I used more garlic scapes (probably 1 1/2 cups) and only a cup of sugar with my low/no-sugar pectin. Time will tell what this tastes like with my modifications. I got nine jelly jars (again, one went home with my parents). 

With almost 100 heads of garlic, we were swimming in scapes this spring and I was desperate for something other than a stir fry.

Not the most beautiful color...

Not jam!

I did put up one non-jam item. Using Daphne's brine recipe, I made my first jar of refrigerator pickles for the season. My cucumbers are just now flowering, but I was able to pick up a hoop house-grown cucumber at the farmer's market last weekend. These are delicious, even though my dad says "they taste too much like cucumbers." I'll be making a lot more of this brine.

Jar gifts

A former co-worker sent me a message on Facebook a few weeks ago offering up some extra jars from her grandmother's house. I gladly accepted her offer. She dropped them off while I was at work on Tuesday, and to my surprise she left five boxes of half-pint, pint and quart jars. There must be well over 100 jars in the boxes, some new in the box, and all very high quality. Looks like I'll be able to put up anything that comes out of the garden - hoping for an increased variety of pickles (including squash, green beans and carrots) and hopefully some whole tomatoes. No pictures of the jars - I haven't actually gotten around to unpacking them.

Want more?

Join Robin over at the Gardener of Eden for more Thursday's Kitchen Cupboard posts.

Harvest Monday - June 11, 2012

Some of these radishes were harvested this week, and some the week before. This represents a little less than half of my entire radish harvest. I grew three varieties - I think I'm only going to bother with one next year - hopefully one that sizes up better than my Easter Egg and French Breakfast radishes did. Many of them failed to form a suitable root at all.

All of this lettuce was harvested on Wednesday. It's a mix from Pine Tree, as well as a lot of yellow oak leaf lettuce I had left over from last year.

This is the second harvest of scapes; the first harvest was about the same amount. I have a total of 10 heads of hard neck garlic planted, and about half of them have scapes left (some more in the shade are still forming) - I'm waiting for them to make "the curl" before I cut them.

If you pretend that I have another picture of lettuce and scapes exactly like the ones above, that's what I harvested on Sunday night.

Although it's not from my garden, we picked 38 pounds of strawberries from a local fruit farm on Sunday morning. We have about 6 gallons of frozen berries, 13 jars of jam, and a few quarts for fresh eating this week.

Happy harvesting! Check out harvests from around the world on Daphne's Dandelions.