Getting Some Chores Done

Well I never got a chance to go out to do more digging in the garden. I've been busy with other things. This week I've been mowing the leaves. I love sucking up the leaves with my little Neuton. It isn't perfect. It can't suck up the leaves from depressions, but anything on the grass works great. I end up with some nice chopped leaves for my leaf bin.

This year I found the leaves that I collected from others (which I haven't started yet but will soon) decayed in various quickness. If the leaves were chopped up they decayed very well. Most of the leaves were used up over the year to add to the compost pile, but what was left in the bin at the end of the year was leaf mold if the leaves were chopped. The maple leaves decayed, but not as well. The only holdouts were the oak leaves. My whole backyard is oak so getting them chopped is great. I think when I do go out to collect leaves I'll empty the bags out and chop them up before adding them to the bin.

I've also been busy with apples this week. At the farmers market they had 10lb bags of apples for $6 so I got a couple of bags for applesauce. The varieties were Cortland and Spencer. The applesauce wasn't as good as the earlier batch with Ginger Gold and McIntosh.

When I first ran them through the strainer the sauce was such a pretty pink. I then proceeded to destroy the pretty color by adding cinnamon. Cinnamon applesauce is my favorite.

Twenty pounds of apples makes a lot of sauce. I filled up a case of pint jars and still had three quarts left. I froze two and left once quart for eating this week. I kept looking for one of my stray pint jars. I thought I had a couple jars emptied already, but couldn't find them anywhere.

Oh yeah. I pickled some hot peppers earlier and totally forgot about them. I'm guessing they might be ready to eat by now. Mostly I pickled them just so I could keep them in my fridge instead of the downstairs freezer. I'll use them more often this way.

Saving Pepper and Bean Seeds

While most of my seeds have been dried and put away already, I have some beans seeds and pepper seeds that are still getting prepared. The Early Jalapeno peppers didn't ripen in the garden in time. As frost was coming I had dug up the plant that I isolated for seed saving. I didn't need to keep it long. Just long enough for those peppers to ripen all the way. When it was dug I had one pepper that was partially ripe. Now all the six peppers were showing red.

Two of the peppers were completely ripe so they were taken off the plant.

Their seeds were stripped out and laid out to dry. Over the next week I'm sure the rest of the peppers will be ripe and I'll process those. Then the poor plant will get sent to the compost pile.

Trail of Tears (right), Ottawa Cranberry (left)

The other seeds that are still not done are my bean seeds. Bean seeds can have weevil eggs in them. I have no clue if that is true here or not. I haven't saved any bean seed without killing off the eggs to find out. Killing the eggs is easy. They die if they are subjected to 3 days at 0F (-18C). Suzanne Ashworth claims that you should keep them in the freezer for five days. I've already done this with my beans that I'm going to eat and not save for seed. With those I didn't worry if the seed was dry enough first. If it isn't the seed can die.

So I tested the seed by whacking a few the a hammer. If the seed mushes instead of shattering, it's not ready. All the seed shattered except the one on the far right. That one half shattered. It was just a touch mushy so I'll dry those for a couple of more weeks and try again. The others were put in a ziplock and put in the lowest part of my chest freezer. I'll take them out on Monday.

Snow Again

Thyme

Sunday night we had snow again. I think we got about an inch before it stopped. I figured it would be melted by the morning but at 8:30am it was still there so I had to take a couple of photos. Sadly I really wanted a photo of my lettuce bed. It was so pretty in the snow, but none of them came out. They were all blurry. Really dark mornings are not the best for photography.

The Chard looks happy with the weather.

My remay row covers don't hold up well to snow. They tend to collapse. These hoops are over the spinach. I think I'll remove the hoops before the ground freezes and just lay the remay on top of the spinach.

The snow finally did melt, but not until after 2pm. It is getting really cold out there. I was going to do some digging yesterday, but it was just too cold and damp. I need better weather for some motivation to get outside. Luckily the weathermen say it is warming up for the next few days.

Harvest Monday October 19, 2009

Sadly this is my one harvest photo this week. Just a small bit of broccoli and a not quite ripe Magdalena squash (not counted since I don't know if it is edible or not yet). I also harvested just a small bit of raspberries. It was too cold out last week for many to ripen. I didn't get to eat them though. They were saved for the family that came in last weekend.

I do have more veggies to harvest out in the garden, but I was trying to eat up what was in my fridge, plus this weekend we had a Bar Mitzvah so I wasn't eating much but party food. Right now I have one carrot left and a little lettuce. So next week I'll be out harvesting some more greens.

I did a little stocking up from the farmers' market. We ate the corn for dinner, but I buy extra sometimes to cut off the cob to freeze. This time four cobs were saved. The pumpkins were too pretty to pass up and since they are sugar pumpkins I'll puree them up in a month or so. I'm going to need a lot more squash. The squash was not looking all that good at the market this week. I want some that can store and the few people that had butternut squash didn't have stems. Squash doesn't store well without the stems. Maybe next week will have some better looking squash. I hope so. If not I'll buy it, puree it and freeze it all.

The meat is grass fed hamburger. I'm trying to figure out how much I eat. The markets will close down at the end of October (just two weeks left) and won't start up again until next June. So how much should I buy to get us through the winter? We rarely eat beef except hamburger. I would guess we have a roast about twice a year and steaks about once a year. But we do eat hamburger probably once a week, occasionally twice. We eat about 1/4lb per person. I have two people to feed right now and 4 people for about a month over the holidays. I'm guessing I'd need to buy 18-20lbs of hamburger before the markets close. Right now I have 10lbs. Next week I'll get more.

I also tried to buy my free range eggs. There is just one lady that sells them. Recently she is out of eggs a lot. Sigh. This week she had none. Luckily I know this and the week before I got two dozen. I hope she has more this week. I'm really going to miss them when the markets close down. I'll have to buy eggs at Whole Foods. Mass market free range eggs are not the same as little farm free range eggs where the birds can really free range and eat bugs.

Now onto the tally.

• Berries 0.17 lbs
• Broccoli 0.21 lbs

Weekly total: 0.38 lbs
Weekly spent: $0
Yearly total: 199.48 lbs
Yearly earned: $700.97

If you would like to join in showing off your harvest, put your name and URL into Mr. Linky below. It doesn't matter how big or small your harvest is. You don't have to count the pounds like I do. If you have had a harvest this last week, show us and join in!

Planting Garlic

Garlic planting takes a bit of forethought for me. I can't just run out and plant it whenever I feel like it. I treat my cloves before planting. The night before I plant, I make a baking soda and water solution, about one quart of water to one teaspoon of baking soda. I've seen ratios of a teaspoon to a gallon and a tablespoon to a quart, but I go somewhere in the middle of those extremes. I break apart the cloves and drop them in.

In the morning I peel the cloves and plop them back in for a longer bath - until I'm ready to plant. Many people cringe at this since they say the skins are protection for the cloves, but I did it last year and the garlic grew well. I only lost a couple of cloves and they were from heads that were not that great.

I like to peel them because I can see if the cloves are damaged. With the skin on you can only tell if there is major damage, but the little damage you see above I couldn't see through the skin. I weeded out three bad cloves, all from my Bogatyr. The other reason to peel is the same reason for all the soaking. The garlic has fungi and insect eggs on them, much of it on the skin. Removing it gets rid of a lot, and soaking gets rid of more.

Right before I'm ready to plant, I rinse off the cloves and do another soak. This time with vodka. I've seen sites that say 150 or 100 proof vodka, but all my vodka is 80 proof. So that is what they got. I soak for about three minutes then rinse it off. Now my cloves are ready to plant.

All these cloves are from garlic that I grew this year. I chose my biggest and best heads to plant and from those heads only the larger cloves. The small cloves I saved for cooking later. I have three varieties. German Extra Hardy makes huge cloves, but only about 5 on each head. When I peeled the cloves I couldn't help notice how huge they all were. The next biggest was my unknown variety (from the supermarket last year). It too makes huge cloves, but the skin is slightly red where the XHardy is white. I really need to name this variety. I hate having something unnamed in my garden. The last is Bogatyr. It has much smaller cloves with a bit of purple skin. I thought about ditching this variety, but the cloves were tiny when I got them last year. This year they are bigger. I'm hoping with good conditions they can get even larger. After one more year I'll pick the best two varieties to keep.

I decided to plant them where I recently double dug the potato patch. I added some lime, compost and fertilizer. Then laid out a planting grid. I wanted my garlic 6" apart in all directions on a triangular grid. Once the grid was done I just set them in 4" deep and gave them a couple of inches of compost mulch.

Not everything went perfectly. I found another potato. I really hope they are all up. I can't dig this spot up anymore without distrubing the garlic. After double digging the bed was too high for the soil and extra mulch. I had to add a bigger log to the top. My beds keep getting deeper.

Gack! Snow!

Snow is not unheard of in October, but it is unusual. November is much more normal. Last year we had our first snow storm in December. Usually we don't get any accumulation if we do get October snow. For Boston the snowiest October had a grand total of 0.4 inches of snow. My little hill has a strange microclimate. My first fall frost is usually about a week or two later than the first frost at the bottom of the hill, but I will often get snow when that area is still getting rain. I will be getting to my real post soon, but I couldn't help but share more of the weird weather we have been having this year.

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day October 2009

Korean Dogwood fruit

Well it is Blog Action Day today. I really did think about writing about climate change, but some days it is just a hell of a lot easier to write about my garden. Sometimes you just need a nice flower to cheer you up.

Rudebeckia

This time of the year many of my flowers are dressed up for Halloween. Their pretty pink skirts have been put away. They are in their goth costumes. They are still lovely in their own spikey way.

Echinacea

Not all of my flowers have given up. We had a frost last night, but the rose still thinks it should be blooming.

My tithonia won't stop.

I do have one flower in my garden that blooms just for autumn. Autumn Joy is a perfect name for this plant. When it starts to bloom the bees are so joyful. They cover it.

Preparing for Frost

Sunday was a beautiful day with a distinct chill in the air. I checked the weather forecast and it said it would get to 35F. This was potential frost weather. I still had my peppers outside. They seemed happy enough. I'm not quite sure why. They get barely any sun anymore and it is so cold.

It was time to pull them up. I stripped off all the peppers on the plants. Well all except one plant. This is the plant that I caged to isolate so I could save its seed. One pepper was almost all red, a couple were just turning. The rest were still green. I had two choices. I could cover the plant and hope the peppers ripened before we were hit by a freeze or I could dig this one up. I chose the latter as it was a faster method of getting ripe seed.

I found a pot to fit. It wasn't a really large pot, but the plant only needs to live for a couple of more weeks. I'm glad it doesn't need to live there longer since my clay soil is a far cry from potting soil. The shock of getting the rest of its roots cut off ought to convince it to finish setting seed. I brought it inside and put it in the dinning room window. This spot is warmer and sunnier than its previous location. I hope it will be happy there for the next couple of weeks.

Then my husband wanted to know why I was growing a tree in the dining room. I'm not known for indoor plants. I find them too much work without my friendly beneficial insects that live outside.

Now the bed is even lonelier. All that is left are the carrots. Even if I think they look a tad lonely, I'm sure they are appreciating their breathing room.

The garden is mostly dirt right now. Last year I did a better job. I sowed a cover crop of oats and vetch. I have the seeds this year, but didn't get around to sowing them in time. I could do it now, but without any sun they won't grow much this year (that photo was taken at 1pm and only a tiny part of the garden is getting sun). I need to be better next year and at the beginning of September over seed the crops that are still growing. It gives the cover crops a nice boost.

And no we didn't get a frost on Sunday night. We have frost warnings out most of this week. The most likely time is mid week, maybe tomorrow. Or maybe my first frost will hold of until my normal time, which is the end of October.

Raspberries 2009 Overview

I got a couple of questions about my raspberries today on the harvest post. So this post is to answer some of them and be the first post to go over how the year went with this crop. I planted the raspberry patch 18 years ago. I had two sections (each about about 6' long by 4' wide) started in raspberries. I planted three canes of each type. They were bought from Pinetree.

I planted two different kinds one in each section. Lanthum is a summer bearer. It didn't last long in the garden. It never grew well and got diseased and was unhappy. I eventually ripped it up.

September berries

The other variety I planted was Heritage. It too got the same disease as Lanthum (something that makes each of the segments of the berries not ripen all at the same time and also makes them crumbly). It just didn't seem to care. I would lose a few berries to it , but not many. It would produce well anyway.

The first year that the raspberries grew they didn't produce much. The second year was OK. After about three years they had filled their space up and were producing like mad. Raspberries send runners underground. Once they get settled they act like weeds. A few times a year I have to go out and rip out roots that are trying to take over other sections of the garden.

Raspberry canes right before pruning back

My berries are planted in partial shade right at the edge of the woods. They do not get full sun. In the summer they probably get about four hours of full sun. At this time of the year they would be lucky to get about an hour of sun, but I haven't timed it. Since they grow well I don't worry about it. One side of their bed is raised with a small little poorly made rock wall. Which means it was put up by me. I'm the opposite of EG, I try to engineer everything so it just barely works. The least amount of effort to make it work right is my motto. MIT, my alma mater, is probably ashamed of me by now. The other side is bound by the driveway which is just slightly higher than the bed.

I have fertilized this bed exactly once in five years. I like to keep the leaves that blow into the bed there to mulch it. In the past decade we had a landscaping service that would blow them out even if I asked them not to. Now I'm doing it myself so they will once again be left in. There isn't a lot of work involved with the raspberries bed. Once a year I cut out the spent canes in July and at the same time thin out the new canes. In addition in March I usually clean up the bed of any canes broken over the winter by snow and prune off the old flower heads if I didn't do it in the fall. If it didn't try to invade its neighbors so much it would be the easiest bed in my whole yard.

The Heritage plant produces berries in July on year old canes. It does this in a very short time over about two to three weeks (this year July 14th- Aug 2nd). This year it produced 6.5 lbs of summer berries. Then starting in late August (Aug 25th this year) it produces fall berries on new canes. It will keep producing for quite a while. Frost won't stop them. It will kill the flowers, but the fruit that has set will still ripen. A true freeze will shut them down though. Last year I was still harvesting in early November. When it gets cold they do slow down a bit. So far this fall I have harvested 6.4lbs of berries. I have plenty of berries on my cereal every morning and still some left over to freeze.

As to problems with the crop, I had more than usual. The fall berries were more moldy and rotting than usual. I had to toss a lot of the berries in September as they would mold and ripen at the same time. The October berries seemed better. Also in September I had wasps (some kind of paper wasp) start eating the raspberries. At their height they ate about half the crop. They had disappeared by October.

Raspberries love rain, so our weird wet weather didn't bother them in the least. In fact they probably grew better than an average year.

Harvset Monday October 12, 2009

This last week was all about pulling out all the tender crops and cleaning up. The pineapple tomatillos came out so the last harvest was larger than before. I picked up all the tomatillos that fell to the ground. Any that hadn't filled out their husk were tossed. The other will probably ripen just fine.

I had a lot of parsley that had hidden in the beans and zucchinis. I ripped them up. I don't need them to go to seed next year. I have plenty in the herb garden for seed. Since I was ripping them up I harvested the greens and dried them. I also pulled the roots. I kept two because they looked so pretty and I thought they were edible. After some research I found out they tend to be woody and aren't worth eating. They sure smelled good though.

Sunday the frost warnings came out. I don't think I'll get one, but I picked all the peppers on the plants anyway. I don't think with the cold weather they will get much larger even without a frost. Ditto for the cucumbers.

As always in the fall I had a nice raspberry harvest this week. The best fall harvest yet for the berries. I only take photos when I get a nice flush as I got this Tuesday.

Now onto the tally.

• Alliums 0.16 lbs
  
• Beans 0.32 lbs
• Berries 1.08 lbs
• Broccoli 0.16 lbs
  
• Cucurbits 0.33 lbs
• Greens 0.19 lbs
  
• Peppers 0.69 lbs
• Tomatillo 0.59 lbs
  

Weekly total: 4.11 lbs
Weekly spent: $0
Yearly total: 199.10 lbs
Yearly earned: $698.55

If you would like to join in showing off your harvest, put your name and URL into Mr. Linky below. It doesn't matter how big or small your harvest is. You don't have to count the pounds like I do. If you have had a harvest this last week, show us and join in!

Fall Greens

Most of my fall crops are under row covers right now. It makes the garden a very sad place since you can't see much green anymore. White little bubbles just don't make for a beautiful garden. There are a couple of crops that are still lovely and not yet covered.

My chard has been a favorite in the garden for a long time. I started harvesting from this batch in the middle of May. It is still going strong.

The lettuce is getting to be a good size. The heads never get really big in the fall for me, so I harvest them a leaf at a time. Luckily I have a lot of plants going now.

Under the covers are lots of different greens. The tatsoi above is going strong. I ought to pick it soon. Sometimes I have trouble picking the really pretty plants. Tatsoi is in that category. It makes such a beautiful rosette. Last time I harvested them only because I had new tatsoi transplants that needed their spot in the garden.

Under a bubble all its own is my spinach. I'm starting to think it is too late for much of a spinach harvest this fall. Maybe. If not I'll over winter it under a row cover and eat it in the spring. Frankly I'll probably want it more in the spring than now in the fall, but I worry. I've yet to overwinter any green successfully. Maybe with spinach and mache I'll be sucessful. I can hope.

Sunflower

As I've been cleaning up the garden, I've decided to leave most of the sunflowers on the plants for the animals to find over the winter. So far I've had no birds or squirrels eat my sunflowers. Isn't that strange?

I've kept one head. I'm thinking of planting the seed next year. I'm curious to see what plants will grow. The head was from a Lemon Queen sunflower, which is a tall, pale yellow flower, but that was the only one of its variety to grow. My other sunflowers were MusicBox, which is a dwarf variety that has orange markings. Did they cross?

According to Susan Ashworth, sunflowers can be self-incompatible or not depending upon the variety. I don't know what Lemon Queen's behavior is. Since it was part of the Great Sunflower Project, I often watched the bees on the plants. I noticed that the bees that went to the Music Box flowers didn't fly up to the Lemon Queen. They tended to stay low to the ground. And likewise the ones that visited the Lemon Queen flowers flew in high and didn't go down to the ground. That doesn't mean that there was no pollen transfer. It just means that I never saw it. If the Lemon Queen variety is self-incompatible then the one plant couldn't have formed seeds with its own pollen and I would have a hybrid. But what would it look like?

Harvset Monday October 5, 2009

This is my only harvest photo for the week. Yup I had one real harvest. I did pick some raspberries on other days as I always do and got some potatoes while double digging, but other than that nothing. As the fall veggies pick up the rest of the garden has stopped. This week I harvested the first of my leeks, Chinese cabbage and kale. Some more carrots were picked. Not many just enough for a week.

I just want to let Frances notice that the Chinese cabbage really doesn't have that much slug damage on the inside of the head. There are a few holes, but barely any at all.

Two weeks ago I harvested almost 8 lbs, one week ago 6 lbs, this week just 5 lbs. With the sun so low in the sky and the back yard to the south east covered in tall trees and the side yard to the south west with my neighbor's tall house, my garden only sees about 2 hours of sun a day now. Certain parts don't even get that. Growth is slowing down. Luckily most fall crops are can grow OK with some shade. I'm sure they want more than what I'm giving them, but I can't help them out. They might get a couple weeks of nice sun when the trees lose their leaves, but only if the weather stays warm enough - an unlikely combination.

I think my 200 pound hope for the garden is well within reach. I only need five more pounds and if I picked what was in the garden right now I would exceed that. Whoohoo! I've had some bad setbacks this year with the corn and the squash, but still what was good, was pretty good and made up for them. I think when November hits and nothing is happening in the garden, I'll do a detailed analysis of what is good and what I need to change. I'll have all the harvest data (which is more detailed than what you see since I do it by variety on my spreadsheet).

Last week I asked you all about what to do about Harvest Monday. The overwhelming response was for me to keep it and try to morph it into something broader. So I'll try to do that. I really hope the people that are havesting over my winter will keep adding their harvests in. I know in this area it will be hard to pull off a real harvest post in late November. Last year we had some good weather in early November that turned right in the middle. My last harvest was on November 16th. At that time they were predicting lows in the teens so the ground was going to freeze solid, so I dug up all my root crops and anything else I wasn't trying to overwinter. Who knows what this year will bring.

Anyway onto the tally.

• Alliums 1.14 lbs
  
• Beans 0.10 lbs
• Berries 0.83 lbs
• Carrot 0.33 lbs
  
• Cucurbits 0.19 lbs
• Greens 1.24 lbs
  
• Peppers 0.03 lbs
• Potatoes 1.13 lbs
  
• Tomatillo 0.08 lbs
  

Weekly total: 5.07 lbs
Weekly spent: $0
Yearly total: 195.10 lbs
Yearly earned: $671.53

If you would like to join in showing off your harvest, put your name and URL into Mr. Linky below. It doesn't matter how big or small your harvest is. You don't have to count the pounds like I do. If you have had a harvest this last week, show us and join in!

Working Hard

This last week has been extremely busy in the garden. My major chore for the week was to double dig the potato bed. The rest of the bed had been double dug in the spring and I did't want to leave this section out of the fun.

Fun for the plants that is not necessarily for me. I did a section that was a little bit bigger than the bin itself, so had a 4'x5 1/2' section to do. This probably took a total of three hours to dig. The top part is so easy, but the bottom sections have maple tree roots and a clay rock mix that is like cement. It is what takes all of my time.

I removed a nice host of big rocks to add to my collection. You may have noticed that I use rocks for edging and for holding down row covers. They are very useful. The smaller rocks I put on the rock pile near my neighbor's fence in the back. I always think it is such a waste to remove rocks. Rocks have so many good minerals in them. I wish I had an easy and safe way to crush them.

I added three inches of compost mixed into the bottom subsoil part that was double dug, just as I did in the spring. Hopefully it will encourage the worms to keep that well tilled without me. Between that and the fluffing up of the soil, I raised the level of the bed up by six inches. I had to add another layer of logs on to keep the soil contained. I'm sure it will compact down a bit over the winter, but I might make it worse by planting my garlic here. If I do, then I will mulch it which will add another three inches.

I found a few treasures buried in the ground. I had missed some potatoes. These are the ones that I dug out one day. The next day I found even more including a huge one. How did I miss a 10 ounce potato? Needless to say I was happy to add them in to the tally.

I have more sections that I would love to get double dug this fall, but what doesn't happen now will have to happen in the spring. I have a section by the fence that is overrun with maple tree roots. The section is at the tree's drip line). I would love to dig it up and loosen the soil. In the past I've kept herbs here, but since I moved the herb bed over to the other side of the garden a few years back I don't need to keep it here. The only loss would be my old sage plant and a thyme I'm not as in love with as I used to be. Oh and an oregano that I have duplicated in the new herb bed. This year the space was used to house my tomato pails. Except for the nasty maple tree, it is a great spot in the garden. It gets more sun than any other section.

My other chore this week was the continued removal of dying plants, removal of the trellises and weeding of the ground that I haven't seen since spring. I have more clean up to do, but this weekend is getting rained out so the rest will have to wait for drier weather.

As you can see the garden looks pretty bare. It lacks its vertical structure not to mention the plants. I have just two bamboo poles left and the trellis against the fence for the cucumbers. And white alien pods are taking over the garden. As it gets colder more will pop up. The lettuce will be covered. The chard will get covered. The mache will get covered if it comes up (I think I have three little mache plants now - maybe).

Compare that to this photo at the height of summer (August 4th). My jungle is gone.

A Switch to Fall Crops

My summer crop harvests have been slowly disappearing. Yesterday I pulled up the first four peppers plants. They had no chance of more peppers so there was no reason to leave them in. I pulled all the bean plants but one. It has four pods left drying. Soon it will be pulled too. The tomatillos still give me a few, but a lot of husks are dropping now that aren't ready. The plant is yellow. Really only the cucumbers and the remaining 8 pepper plants have some life left in them and the cucumber doesn't have much time left. Then again it isn't summer anymore. It is fall and it is time for the fall plants to start being picked.

Once I started I went a bit wild picking them. The first to come up were the leeks. I had two small sections of leeks. I picked the ones over by the chard (which was mercifully spared my picking frenzy). The other one will be left for colder weather.

A few leeks were freaky. One looked red and slightly shriveled. It had some weird fluting around the edges. That one was escorted to the compost pile.

Another was trying to send off little babies from its roots. It wasn't succeeding well. The new shoots were compacted into the outer layer of the mama leek. Above is what it looked like once taken apart. It was usable after a few sections were cut out.

A third succeeded in acting like a multiplier onion. It didn't have any large shoots, but some small ones around the slightly bigger shoot. I've never had leeks act so strange before. I put them in the ground very, very early. Maybe they are doing strange things because it was too early? Next year I'm going to wait to put in my alliums until April.

The leeks were promptly made into leek and potato soup. Yum!

Then I thought that I still haven't tried kale yet. Not ever in my life. I wanted to taste it. So I went to the two plants I have and picked some leaves. Any recommendations on how to prepare it for my first time ever? I have to say the leaves don't really look edible. They seem more like plastic than food.

While I was over by the kale I noticed that my Chinese cabbage heads were firming up. I have five of them all planted on the same day. I thought it would be good to pick one a bit early and harvest them slowly over time. If I wait until they are all as big as they can get, I wouldn't be able to eat them fresh as they would go bad too quickly. So one head got picked. I picked it in the middle of the day, but still it was covered in slugs. I ripped off the outer leaves that were shredded and kept the nice inner leaves. There were a few slugs way in the middle, but very little damage. I did open the whole head up and washed each leaf really well.

Then I figured a few carrots would be a nice addition. I might put some of the Chinese cabbage into a stir fry and carrots would go well.

I probably should have picked one thing and used it before picking another, but I do tend to get carried away. I'm sure by the end of the week it will be all gone except for some of the leeks. This week I'm I'm dreaming of stir fry, oriental salad and potato and leek soup. Yum!

Thank You Blotanical

I want to thank all the Blotanists out there that voted for me in Blotanical's yearly awards. I was a finalist in three categories: Best Organic Blog, Best Vegetable Gardening Blog, and Best Massachusetts Blog. For those that don't know what Blotanical is, it is a online gardening social networking site for bloggers or those who just like to read blogs. It has over 1500 gardening blogs listed now. It is a great way to satisfy your blog reading cravings.

I found out yesterday I won in the Best Organic Blog category. I was floored. Last year I wasn't even in the top five for any category. This year I actually won an award. Whoohoo!

Now I have to set the scene. Picture me with a big smile and tears running down my face and me standing on the podium with a statue of a - hmm what should it be? - with a statue of all those wonderful creatures that have helped me out with my gardening this year - birds, ladybugs, lacewings, assassin bugs, frogs, toads, ground beetles, wasps (even if they were eating my raspberries earlier this year), flies, baby fairies (oh wait the rest of you call them glow worms), and last but surely not the least, bees of all kinds. The nasty earwig is not invited onto my statue. He does help eat some bad insects but he he ate all the silks off my corn this year so I got none. Last year he got into my Chinese cabbage and shredded two of the three I had planted.

Anyway, back to my acceptance speech. I want to thank my mom for making me weed and teaching me that hard work is needed in the garden even when you don't want to do it. She also let me pick the strawberries to show me the sweet rewards of gardening. She never once sprayed her garden, but used ducks, turkeys and geese. Their pens surrounded the garden and they ate the grasshoppers that were her major pest, so she taught me to garden naturally. She always had a compost bucket in the kitchen. I grew up thinking this was "normal", so when I finally got a yard it was the first thing I started. Even before any plants went in the ground. I'd like to thank my husband, who won't eat most of what I grow and as far as I know has never stepped in the garden but supports me in anything I do. I'd like to thank Stuart who created Blotanical and has given me a place I call home. Last but not least, I'd like to thank my readers, without whom I wouldn't have won this beautiful award. Thank you all.

I was also runner up in Best Massachusetts Blog and second runner up in Best Vegetable Gardening Blog. So another whoohoo is in order. Whoohoo! Congradulations to Ellie Mae's Cottage and My Little Vegetable Garden, the winners in those categories.