Harvest Monday: August 24

I neglected the garden during the week, saving all my harvests for the weekend. But Friday - Sunday I brought in over 30 pounds of tomatoes, four pounds of beets, a handful of hot and sweet peppers, a large bunch of basil and a lone 8-ball zucchini (the squash beetles are having a field day in the garden).

Here's what the harvest looked like. Well, most of it. In between harvesting and washing and preparing and doing the dishes and making the kitchen messy and cleaning it again I forgot to photograph a few things.

Friday was a mixture of Juliet, Roma, and cherry tomatoes with some fatali and scotch bonnet peppers and some green peppers This particular sweet pepper variety is meant to be picked green, and therefore was the first to mature in the garden. I also have some red peppers and chocolate peppers that have been growing well, but just started to show some color this week.

On Friday night I combined the freshly-harvested hot peppers with some I'd stored in the fridge and attempted to start my first lacto-fermented hot sauce. I'll report back in a few weeks how that went. Prior to putting them in the food processor, weren't these peppers gorgeous?

Saturday was all about the tomatoes. I brought in 25 pounds—6 pounds of Juliets and 19 pounds of Celebrity and Roma. The few green Celebrity tomatoes had fallen from the branches. They don't even have a hint of orange to them so I'll probably do some sort of green tomato preparation.

While picking the tomatoes I spied this very large beet and decided to pick it before it became woody. It's the first full-size harvest of my Lutz Winter Keeper variety.

On Sunday I pulled my golden beets, as they'd started to get heavily attacked by some sort of bug. Because of that, the greens were a loss and went into the compost pile. Once trimmed, they weighed in at 3 pounds, 10 ounces. I also harvested a large bunch of basil, which I forgot to photograph. 

I had to drag the sprinkler out to the garden to water on Sunday, since we haven't had rain for over a week. This is the first time I've had to water the garden in over a month.

In terms of using the harvest, it was tomato palooza on Saturday. I made a 1.5x batch of Annie's salsa (10 pints canned + 1 quart for the fridge), dehydrated 9 pounds of Juliets (yield: 1.5 quarts). 

I also roasted a large pan of tomatoes. The roasted tomatoes were blended into sauce, which I combined with a too-thick roasted sauce from the fridge I'd made earlier in the week that also included carrots, zucchini, and onions. The resulting mixture was still too thick, so I pulled one of my "failed" jars of crushed tomatoes from a few years back out of the pantry. I'd ended up canning mostly tomato water with a little pulp on the bottom. Opening the jar, it still smelled distinctly like tomato, so adding that to the sauce served thinned it without diluting the flavor. I ended up with just over a gallon of sauce, which is frozen flat in Ziploc bags in 2-cup servings. 

Last, but not least, I roasted up the beets. We'll eat plenty fresh this week, but if I have extra after a few days I'll dice and freeze for use in grain salads this winter.

Every Monday gardeners around the world share their harvest. View all of this week's Harvest Monday posts, hosted over at Happy Acres.

Harvest Monday: August 17

This week was all about tomatoes. I brought in three harvests, on Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday, and they were mostly tomatoes with a few peppers and zucchini thrown in. There are some beets ready to harvest but I'm letting them sit for a bit.

Here's what I harvested from the garden this week.

With all of these beautiful tomatoes, they were the stars of our meals this week. We had BZT's on Monday (with no lettuce, we replaced it with a grilled zucchini slice and it was pretty good), panzanella salad on Tuesday, and more BLTs starting on Thursday when we got some more lettuce.

The panzanella salad is tossed with olive oil and then drizzled with a balsamic reduction. I used red tomatoes from the CSA and the yellow tomatoes are Mr. Stripey from the prior week's harvest.

Over the weekend I started to process the tomatoes. 5.5 pounds of Juliet tomatoes went into the dehydrator. This is the first time I dried them as halves rather than slices, per Dave's advice. They took a little longer than I expected (about 26 hours), but they were worth the wait. Not only are they absolutely delicious (my husband says they taste like tomato fruit rollups), but because I dried them skin side down, the dehydrator trays are still clean! Cleaning up trays after dehydrating sliced tomatoes can be a pain. You've converted me, Dave. Will do another batch later this week.

Another 7 pounds of Celebrity and Mr. Stripey went into some salsa for canning. I use a tested recipe from Annie, a contributor on the Houzz (formerly GardenWeb) Harvest forum. Annie's salsa is our favorite, and I'll try to make at least two more batches this summer. The Celebrity tomatoes were perfect for this recipe, with their fleshy consistency. They were also extremely easy to peel and deseed. I got seven pints for canning, and about 3/4 cup leftover that I used on a smothered burrito for brunch on Sunday.

If you'd like to see what other gardeners around the world are doing with their harvest, head on over to Happy Acres, where Dave hosts Harvest Monday every week.

Harvest Monday: August Is Here

I had four separate harvests from the garden this week, and plant diversity is increasing. That means August is here! I had the week off of work, so I was able to spend a lot of time in the garden, thinking about the garden, and planning for some big changes for next year's garden (more to come on that in a separate post).

Tuesday, when I posted my July garden journal, I picked a handful of tomatoes and peppers, but forgot to photograph them. I did remember to take photos of the garden though. The first photo has my winter squash on the left, 8-ball zucchini and fennel poking up behind them, and the mass of tomatoes in the back. The foreground is peppers and a row of Swiss chard.

It didn't feel like 80 degrees in the shade; it was a lovely morning. Here you'll see my sparse rows of beans (1) and carrots (4). Behind those are the rutabagas. They look wilted because I'd just thinned them. Behind those you can barely see the rows of beets. So far I've only had to water the garden two or three times because we've been getting regular rain. The squash plants were thirsty by Friday afternoon, but with rain in the forecast on Sunday I held off (right now watering is a production of connecting and running a 50-foot hose). The rain came in multiple downpours, so the squash should be happier now.

I remembered to photograph the remaining harvests. On Thursday I got more tomatoes (Juliets and some cherries), a green pepper, two 8-ball zucchinis, and some super chili ornamental peppers.

Saturday brought two harvests: the first ripe Celebrity tomato, and a mountain of beet thinnings (Lutz Winter Keeper and Golden) providing a glut of baby beets and beet greens, which I've yet to process.

A quick spin through the garden on Sunday before the rain came found more tomatoes, including the first few Romas, another pepper, more chiles, and some jalapenos (Mighty Nacho).

Although I sliced a few for a pizza, most of the Juliets have been roasted and eaten with eggs for breakfast. When I start getting them in larger quantities I'll dehydrate them. The cherry tomatoes and peppers are combined with CSA veggies for mason jar salads that Aaron has been taking to work. While trying to get feedback on what salads he liked best, I learned it doesn't matter what veggies are in it as long as there's some smoked pork. So he smoked another pork roast this weekend so he'd have salads for this week.

Some of the jalapenos I harvested Sunday went into a jalapeno corn bread that we had with the pulled pork and some CSA corn on the cob. It will make a good side for Aaron's Southwest salads this week, too.

That's all from Gross Farms this week. I hope you'll head over to Happy Acres to see what Dave and the other Harvest Monday participants are pulling out of their gardens and cooking.

Hopefully in a few days I can get a post together about the BIG garden plans for 2021.

Garden Journal: July 2020

I've always had good intentions of keeping a garden journal. I read memoirs like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle or Garden Wisdom: Lessons Learned from 60 Years of Gardening and imagine the treasure trove of journals the authors must have drawn from. Any garden journal I've kept doesn't make it past a few entries. This blog is the closest thing I have to a journal. I need to stop imagining a journal as a physical book that I write in every day or every week. The concept of journaling is to create time to reflect and remember events in the future. My blog, camera roll, Instagram and Facebook accounts, and garden planning software serve that function in aggregate. I've given myself permission to be a good gardener without a garden journal.

Today was different. I have the week off from work, and my intention is to spend most of my time in the garden, the kitchen, or with my nose in a book. This morning, after a cup of tea and a peach scone baked from scratch, I brought my second cup of tea out to the garden and unfolded a camping chair. I just sat and looked at things. When the carrots or rutabagas were just screaming to be thinned, I obliged. I pulled a few weeds. I propped up a leaning pepper plant and harvested a few ripe tomatoes. I kept noticing things I wanted to remind myself of next year, now that I'm 8 weeks into the first season of gardening in an open canvas of dirt, rather than raised beds or designated planting holes through fabric as I have for the last decade. I came up with quite the list, from the practical to the philosophical. I'm documenting it here for future reference, and for any unintended benefit to aspiring or current gardeners who stumble upon this post.

The Garden As A Living Space

A garden is a place to relax (or work hard) and enjoy my home. Space left open for paths or to give veggies room isn’t wasted; it’s prioritizing the garden as living space. For years I tried to maximize my yield per square foot, sometimes planting raised beds in the square foot gardening method. I only planted corn once (it was a failure due to strong storms, animals, and general neglect) because I couldn't justify just two delicious ears of corn per stalk. What was I thinking, that's the perfect amount for dinner! Prioritizing for yield may mean minimizing enjoyment. My garden is not intended to be a second job.

The shade tent is amazing for working on hot, sunny days, but it’s cumbersome for one short person to move around, especially because the legs dig into the ground. Perhaps we could put some tennis balls or something on the bottom of the legs to make it easier to drag?

Spacing: Never Trust An Ambitious Gardener

• 18”-24” spacing for peppers is perfect. Consider adding a support pole right away, and tying plants to poles about 6 weeks post transplant. Don’t wait for them to fall over. Treat them nicely. 
• GIVE THE DETERMINANT TOMATOES MORE SPACE. 18” apart is not enough. It creates a tangled mess, increases chances I miss ripe tomatoes, and makes harvesting more unpleasant since my skin reacts poorly to tomato leaves. Plant them 2’-3’ apart next year. So far, yields are amazing. I may not need to plant 20 plants next year. TBD. 

• Although the winter squash do just fine direct seeded in a hill, I need to commit to removing seedlings so I have the quantity I planned for. This year I didn't do that, and I'm curious to see if it will yield to overall smaller squash. They do really well in my garden both up free-standing trellises and on the ground. If I continue letting them spread on the ground, I should mulch heavily with cardboard and straw or grass right after planting so I don’t have to worry about that area for the rest of the season (other than the hills).

Spring Reminders

• Never put off mulching. Mulching makes everything grow better, makes maintenance easier, and it’s pretty! When planting rows of direct-seeded vegetables, consider mulching first, and leaving space where the rows will be. That should motivate me to still plant on time but the mulching will be done!
• I’ll probably never regret under planting seeds (more room to grow, larger/healthier plants) but I will regret over planting them because of the extra work of thinning, less room for air to move when harvesting, etc.
• It’s a good idea to seed radishes in with carrots, but do so sparingly (no more than 1 per foot) and only with the quickest growing varieties. This makes more sense to me than planting a dedicated row of radishes, because they’re not my favorite vegetable. 
• It’s probably worth the tedium to create carrot seed strips or mats for planting, and always best to use seed that’s 1-2 years old. Old carrot seed doesn’t seem to fade as well as other varieties. Old beet, rutabaga, and chard seed does just fine though. 
• Begin watching indeterminant tomatoes to prune suckers immediately. If I let one go so long it becomes a stem with blossoms on it, I won’t have the heart to prune it and I’ll regret it by July or August. Commit to tying the tomatoes to their stakes once a week whether I think they need it or not. If I continue to grow cherry tomatoes up rebar, I need to plant more (assuming I’m limiting them to a single vine). As my garden expands, I may want to consider planting them in some sort of container where 3-4 vines would be allowed to develop and drape over the sides.
• Chard works just fine direct seeded in my garden. Kale is more challenging that way and should probably be transplanted.
• The 8-ball zucchini grows straight up and puts out climbing vines. While it’s doing fine in hills, it would probably do well in a row in front of a trellis. 
• Direct seeding basil was a bust (possibly because of old seed but I suspect because of inconsistent moisture). Definitely start these indoors for transplant.

Early Summer Reminders

• Thin beet greens at 4 weeks for greens only, 6-8 weeks for baby beets (but the latter is probably slowing down growth of the main crop). Remember- they put out more than one seedling per seed by nature. It’s ok to space them generously when planting.
• If critters eat my beans plants, replant promptly. They’ll catch up quickly (missed opportunity in 2020).

If anyone else is reading this, what has your garden taught you so far this year? What mistake do you seem to keep making year after year?

Harvest Monday: First Tomatoes of 2020

The garden is looking lovely, although honestly I feel like I've been neglecting it since I'm only out there a couple of times per week. My plant selections anticipated that behavior, so I think it should be ok. On Monday (no photo) we harvested our first full-size green sweet pepper, some basil and a single Sungold tomato, which tasted like heaven.

On Sunday night I stepped into the garden before a strong rainstorm and harvested two 8-ball zucchini (which went with a third we'd harvested on Monday), three more green sweet peppers, a bright red Yum Yum pepper, and a few unexpected handfulls of Juliet tomatoes, along with more Sungolds and the first Sweet 100s. Getting tomatoes before the end of July here is a real treat. I'm sure I'll be drowning in tomatoes before long (I have 20 paste tomato plants, two cherries, and two slicers).

Two of the peppers and all three of the zucchini were immediately used for dinner. I stuffed the zucchini with a mixture of onions, peppers, cooked radish and kohlrabi greens, black beans, brown rice, Penzey's fajita seasoning and shredded cheese. We have lots of leftovers; each of us ate about half of one and an ear of sweetcorn from our CSA.

I'm also getting a CSA this year, so that's where a lot of our veggies come from. We've been rolling in the greens though, because in addition to the CSA I've been pulling radishes from the garden and trying to use their leaves, and I've thinned just one row of beets (I have 4 more to go) and used the greens in a variety of dishes. I tried my hand at fermenting radish greens for about a week and used them in fried rice. The beet greens mainly end up in egg dishes and pastas. The reason I had leftover cooked greens to put in our stuffed zucchini was because I cleaned and chopped all the radish and kohlrabi greens we had and put them on a pizza. Using a store-bought crust, I used basil pesto for sauce (I found the pesto—from 2014—buried in the freezer and it still tastes fine), then piled the pizza with greens, mozzarella cheese, more greens, and then curls of zucchini tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Finished it off with some fresh basil from the garden. We'll definitely make this again. (I was inspired by this recipe.)

I took some garden photos on July 5, before I'd finished most of my mulching. These are three weeks old now, but they'll help establish the layout of my barden.

In the foreground of the first photo (past the weeds) from right to left is: melons (Minnesota Midget and Banana), beets (pre-thinning), rhutabaga (pre-thinning), and some irregularly seeded rows of carrots with radish markers.

On the opposite side of the black path on the right are my determinant tomatoes (20 plants), and on the left is my pepper patch (both sweet and hot), and some fledgling kale and sweet chard seedlings (that are doing much better now).

From another point of view, you can see the four determinant tomatoes climbing up rebar, with the rhubarb plant behind them. To the right of the tomatoes is a small basil patch, and moving right from there is fennel, celery, zucchini, and winter squash (Red Kuri and Waltham Butternut).

This post is a part of Harvest Monday, hosted by Dave at Happy Acres. Head over to his post to see what gardeners around the world are harvesting.

Perhaps the Pandemic Will Prompt More Gardening

It's funny and also a little sad to look at my last post here, from May 2017. We worked our tails off and got those beds in, then spent a small fortune on what was supposed to be really high quality garden mix with a high percentage of compost to fill them. Then we had two main problems:

• It was just too wet down there. We never were able to fill in around the beds, and it basically became a mud pit. The beds wanted to start rotting almost immediately.
• Something was wrong with the garden mix, and it stunted almost everything planted in it. My guess is the compost in the mix was still "hot."

I did have a great upper garden that year, though. I covered the entire 800 square feet in black landscape fabric, and created holes in it to plant. I had bumper crops in both 2017 and 2018, although controlling the weeds up there is an ongoing challenge (that's why I went with garden fabric).

The garden in 2017 (June) making good use of plastic lawn fabric

Harvest from one September day in 2018

2017 was the beginning of a few years that threw us a lot of curveballs. In June 2017, my dad had serious surgery for an aneurysm. He's fine, but he was in ICU for awhile. My father-in-law passed away in November 2017, very unexpectedly. A few months later we found out my mother-in-law had cancer, and she died in August 2018. This was of course a lot of personal stress, but things were also busy on the work front. In fall 2017 I started a business! It's kept me very busy, and now there are 11 people on my team.

Because of that, I was traveling a lot—close to 100 days a year in 2018 and 2019, with a lot of that travel during the growing season. After seeing how the garden was getting away from me in 2018, we made the conscious decision to take 2019 off from gardening. So we did. We also hired landscapers to rip out our back patio and build us a gorgeous new patio and fire pit, and at the last minute decided to have them rip out that nasty mud pit and the retaining well near it, instead sloping our lawn directly to the pond. While digging the base of the patio, they found a huge drainage problem and had to install a new drainage system... it's no wonder we had a mud pit down there.

Part of the new patio, with a slope right into the pond

I thought 2020 might be another no-garden year; travel didn't seem to be letting up and the business continues to grow. Then, in mid-March, travel stopped and I (along with my entire team) started working from home full-time. We'll be working like this until at least July 1, and likely some sort of hybrid home/office situation after that. All of my work-related travel has been cancelled until at least late September.

So why not garden? I didn't start any seeds, and most of my preferred suppliers were sold out when I checked their websites in March/April, so I gladly supported a local greenhouse to get tomato and pepper seedlings, along with a few others. I've started the process of "waking up" the upper garden, where I plan to plant some veggies I don't get a lot of in my CSA, as well as the food we love to preserve. I should have the time.

But once again, it's back-breaking work. It took me two weekends of intermittent work just to make sure I had the asparagus patch ready for it to appear this spring (it just started).

Asparagus bed, just before spears started popping up

I spent this afternoon and early evening in the garden as well. I pulled up all the landscape fabric, and I've been digging out some perennial weeds. I'll till within the next couple of days (when I get a dry day), and then I want to try creating some planting areas that rely more on mulch (newspaper + straw for large plants, shredded paper/straw for small), rather than messing around with the fabric over the entire garden. That gives me the flexibility to plant things like rutabaga and bush beans, which wouldn't have worked in my last setup. I still have some of the landscape fabric, so I'll probably use it for rows (and it will be easier to re-use that way).

Because I've been working so much and our summer vacation (and probably fall) is cancelled, I also have a lot of time off piled up. So I'll have 3 and 4 day weekends the next few weeks to get the garden going, and entire weeks off (or days available for impromptu time) when the harvest and food preservation needs are greatest. Even if I'm sore for days, being in the garden makes me happy and allows me to forget everything else that's going on in the world. I'm glad I can focus on it this year.

A Very Muddy Work Day

What happens when you have just one day set aside to rent a sod cutter to get ready for your raised beds, and it rains for days and days before that? Lucky for me, I now have this experience and can answer the question.

1. The sod cutter wheels get caked with mud and fail to grip, so it requires some man-handling.
2. The sod is much, much heavier than it would be if given a few days to try out.
3. Carrying the sod to its resting place for composting turns your husband into Mud Man.

I just pulled these clothes out of the dryer. They're amazingly clean.

We stripped the sod from a roughly 65' x 6' area. I have an in-progress picture, but won't get another one until we dig out the bits that refused to be cut and it dries up a bit. Currently, we've just created a mud pit. It rained all day the day after we did this.

The bed on the right up against the retaining wall is home to about a half dozen raspberry plants, and a lot of weeds. We used some of the cut sod to smother the weeds and mulch the bed. The area in the middle will soon be home to eight 6' x 3' raised beds.

The upper garden is much further along. On April 23 I completed the prep and planting of the bed along the fence. What was once a forest of weeds and unwanted landscaping plants is now home to 50+ garlic plants, 200 onion plants, and 21 asparagus crowns.

Last week we had a landscaping crew on our property for two days, working to clean out the overgrowth and weeds around the property. Part of what they did for me was clear out a roughly 800 square foot area that will become the main part of the upper garden. I got two areas planted on Saturday - the strawberry/rhubarb patch (24 ever-bearing strawberries; rhubarb was existing) and the pea patch. I planted two 7-foot rows of peas along both sides of the temporary fence, and around the two tripod structures I found on the property. There's still room for another row, so I think I'll plant radishes here on the next dry day if I can find some seeds in my stash.

I also spent a lot of time this weekend potting up plants. In fact, my phone just died because I was down in the basement so long listening to podcasts, so I don't have any pictures. I'll have to save those for next time!

Head on over to Our Happy Acres for Harvest Monday to see what other gardeners are harvesting, prepping, planting, or preserving!