What do you do with an eight pound cabbage?

The night before last we had a freeze which finally killed our beans. The freeze was a wake up call to start picking what needed to be picked in the garden. The first thing I wanted to deal with was the Michihili Chinese cabbages. The problem with them is that they are BIG cabbages. They get over two feet tall. They just don't fit in the fridge well. Sometimes I cut them in half so they will fit but the best way to deal with them is to use them when you pick them. I picked just one and one is a lot to deal with. The cabbage was eight pounds. That is a lot of cabbage.

First up was Peking Raviolis. My daughter had eaten most of them up before. She would take a packet of pork ravs and a packet of vegetable ravs and have them for lunch. So this time I elected to make a mix. I made enough mix for about 120 ravs. It takes me about an hour to make 60 (which is how many dumpling wrappers come in a packet). So I turned on the TV and got to it. I did half of them yesterday and hope to get the other half done today. Once they are formed I freeze them. If I have the energy for it, I'll do it again with the next cabbage next week. Sadly they don't take all that much cabbage. How much is 4 cups of chopped cabbage. A pound maybe?

The second meal to make was cabbage soup. This is so much easier to make. And I recruited my townhouse mate to help. So we multiplied the recipe by four and used up three pounds of cabbage.

Rav filling on the left, soup on the right.

After having a nice lunch of soup we packed up the rest. I had five pint containers filled for future lunches. And I still had a huge cabbage to eat. Sigh. Eight pounds of cabbage is a huge amount to go through. And I had run out of ground pork in my fridge. It seems all the cabbage recipes that I freeze use pork.

So I tried something new. I took a pound of cabbage and made pickled cabbage. But I'm not a fan. The recipe was way too sweet and way too puckery. Next time I'll tone it down.

Sadly at the end of the day I still had the above left to stick into the fridge. The size is a bit deceptive as it is 18" long. I found how it grew interesting. I love the spiral in the leaves, but it sure made it more of a pain to chop. Today I have other things to do as my MIL is visiting, but I did have time to make some coleslaw dressing so I'll chop some of that cabbage up and call it salad. That ought to get rid of another pound or so.

Harvest Monday, November 4th, 2013

Carrots were a big harvest this week. I picked three bunches, one of which didn't get photographed. I'm guessing the carrot harvest will be better than last year by about five pounds, but it will be eaten so fast. My daughter came home to take a year off of school and she is such a carrot lover. We have already eaten about a third of the carrots in just a month. Usually the carrots last me until late spring. But they are so good. We ate all the Mokums already and have started on the later and bigger SugarSnax. They are nice and sweet as we have had some cold weather.

Spinach has been a big hit with me and my townhouse mates. The rest of the garden doesn't really get sun from October on - I grow the vegetables and hold them in the garden until I want to eat them - but the circle garden where the spinach is planted is one partially sunny spot, so they are still growing. I pick and a week or two later the leaves are all back. I've been eating a lot of spinach and mizuna salads.

And speaking of mizuna, I eat some Asian greens every week. This week a kohlrabi was added to the mix.

And since it was predicted to be somewhere between 24F and 29F last night I picked all the beans I could find. And the figs that were ripe. It got down to 29F but still no frost. Heck 28F is usually a freeze, not just a frost. I wonder if the beans will survive this too. I don't know why the plants aren't frosting over in such cold temperatures. But it did give me an extra quarter pounds of beans to eat with a meal this week.

And I made some fig jam with the figs from last week. A very small batch as I had just half a pound. I didn't bother to can it as I just made one jar and put it in the fridge.

• Beans 0.27 lbs
• Carrots 2.69 lbs
• Greens 3.94 lbs
• Greens, Asian 1.59 lbs
• Weekly Tally 8.49 lbs
• Yearly Tally 491.04 lbs, $1006.42
• Figs 0.42 lbs

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

Still Slowly Cleaning Up

Over the last week I've been very slowly cleaning up. A little here and there. Above was the lettuce, celery, and herb bed. It didn't have much in it that was any good. The celery had been harvested and the lettuce was bolting. The parsley was turning yellow. The basil died eons ago to a mildew. So it all got pulled out and was spread with some sifted compost.

This the the after photo of the bed. I had forgotten to seed some mache this fall, but it self seeded itself right here. Not very thickly, but I might get a tad next spring when the snow comes off. And I have one winter savory plant. I haven't a clue what to do with it. I planted it because I didn't know what winter savory was. It turns out it has a lemon scent. If anything it reminds me most of lemon thyme. I figured it might be very different, like when I grew marjoram for the first time. I haven't harvested it. I don't know what to do with it. I suppose it would be nice in a salad dressing or with fish. But it isn't jumping up and screaming "use me". So it is getting neglected.

The other two beds I cleared out were the mustard beds. This is the experimental late mustard (planted early August) that didn't have time to ripen. I guess it made a good cover crop. The other bed (planted end of June), had its second cutting of ripening mustard. This cutting wasn't fully ripe, but I expect it to ripen inside in the pod. It ought to be fine. I'll use the earlier one for seeding next year though. I sifted through more compost and covered these beds up too.

I also pulled up and trimmed some older now dying plants. Kronos decided to help me break down the eight foot tall sunflower plants. He is still working on them.

I now have 6 beds left out of 17. Plus a few scattered flower beds in the yard. They contain spinach, cabbage, Asian greens, carrots, broccoli/chard, and kale. I probably have compost for one or two of them, but no more. I might have to purchase some compost next year. I didn't have to do that last year. The year before I had just two beds that needed extra compost. A friend of my townhouse mates brought some over for me (she owns horses). I'm so close to making enough for my own use, but I'm right at the edge and some years I just don't have enough.

I've been cooking and weirdly making salads during the cold weather. The above salad is so strange. It is spinach, mizuna, cucumber, and avocado. The latter is not from my garden. Yes I'm still eating cucumbers. I have just a few left. They are holding well. But I don't think I've ever made a spinach and cucumber salad. I've certainly never had garden spinach and garden cucumbers together before. My other salad was a winter salad. It had black beans, squash, apple, mizuna, and smoked Gouda. Oh is it good. I'll be having it again for lunch today.

And last but not least, I got a gift today. I mentioned to Susan that I loved guava jam, so she sent me one from her strawberry guavas. It is delicious. Thanks Susan. Guavas certainly aren't something I can grow here.

Harvest Monday October 28th, 2013

Did you know I've never had a fresh fig before? Well except at a restaurant. Now I've got to figure out what to do with them. the first I ate with some cheese. I'd like to cook the other three, but not sure about recipes. I guess I'll have to look some up.

I picked the first of the fall beans and maybe the last. There have been three frosts in the neighborhood this last week. For some reason my garden hasn't frosted over. Even when we got down to 30F. Not that I'm complaining. The beans are still alive. Tonight is supposed to be in the 20Fs. I can't imagine they will survive that.

I picked all my celery and froze it for the winter. The bucket of greens went into the compost pile. The cleaned up celery in the basket got weighed.

But today is mostly about my seed harvest. I winnowed and weighed my coriander and dill seed this week. And the dried beans were all dry and ready to weigh.

These are all the beans I picked this year (well the ones I haven't eaten already). Some were weighed in other weeks. But it is my dried bean stock for the winter. As you can see I've picked out the seeds for next year already. From left to right I have: Cherokee Trail of Tears black beans (first two jars), Jacob's Cattle, Mexican Pinto, Tigers Eye, and Tarbais. The last jar is also from Tarbais, but it had obviously crossed with another bean. I'm saving only the most perfectly Tarbais like beans for seed for next year.

Bean yield was down this year. I only got about 2/3rds of what I normally get. I always have trouble with rust here, but I had much more trouble than usual. I blame that on my experiment. I really like pole beans better than bush beans. They produce about three times as much in a given area. Though to be fair they do take the spot for the whole year, where bush beans could have a fall crop grow after them. So this year I tried to grow two rows of pole beans along the bed. One in front and one in back. But it just didn't give them enough airflow. So I'm going to have to go back to the chalkboard. I'm going to redo the rotation schedule for next year and see if I can get in more pole beans or not. The problem is that I can't grow summer crops at their foot as they block the sun too much. I wish my beds went east to west like at my last house. Then I could put the pole beans on the north side and not block anything. But the beds are square to the house and south is directly in the corner. The best I can do is plant them on the northwest side of the bed.

Yields lbs/sqft	2013	2012	2011
Trail of Tears	0.20	0.27	0.38
Tarbais	0.17	0.37	0.37
Mexican Pinto	0.17	na	0.31
Tiger Eye	0.04	0.10	na
Jacobs Cattle	0.07	0.09	na

You can tell from the above chart that dried bean yields are not very high in general. It isn't a crop people usually plant as your value per square foot is pretty low. It is a fun crop though and something that is easily stored over the winter. I even grew them at my last house where I was pressed for space (though not nearly as many).

• Alliums 1.96 lbs
• Beans 4.71 lbs
• Greens 1.78 lbs
• Herbs 0.41 lbs
• Weekly Tally 26.25 lbs
• Yearly Tally 473.86 lbs, $942.84

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

Garlic Planting

Celery Ready for the Freezer

Yesterday I was going to take down the whole lettuce bed. It also contains some herbs and celery. I did get the celery down before I was distracted by the garlic.

I decided since it might be the last really nice day it would be a good day to plant my garlic. The weather was just lovely, in the mid 60Fs. I had put aside a paper bag of garlic specially picked for planting. The cloves on the bulbs were big and perfect. I've done this for years. But this time when I opened the bag, the garlic was moldy. Ack! I obviously hadn't dried it enough. I only dried it for just over two weeks in the bike shed this year and usually I do it for three. But the weather was so hot in there this time I thought they would be fine. The ones in the basement in a mesh bag had no mold issues. So I tossed my beautiful big heads and used my others. Too bad. I still have plenty of garlic to eat this year. But I'm sad my bulbs with big cloves are gone. The big cloves really give the garlic a jump start on growth.

Looking East

The beds are really starting to look bare as I slowly pull things out. Do you see the string running along the beds? Well my daughter's dog understands that he is not supposed to go into the beds and is usually pretty good. But if something is in the way (like a person), he ignores it and just walks across them to get where he wants to go. Or cuts the corner if he is in a hurry. So I put up the string to give him a boundary. I'm no longer letting him down the long paths. He wasn't happy about that. But my newly planted garlic will thank me.

Looking West

This view is even more bare, but it is deceptive since there is a full bed of Asian greens and some beans past the row cover. And under that row cover are my cabbages and kohlrabi.

Winnowing

Yesterday was all about getting my seed harvest sorted out. I keep paper bags in the corner of my dining room full of seeds of various kinds. The beans had already been sorted out, but I still had mache (which I forgot to plant this fall), three kinds of lettuce, coriander, dill and mustard seeds to deal with. I got all but the mustard done. Sadly the lettuce seeds I didn't label. So I have three kinds of lettuce seed - Red Sails, Little Gem, and Deer Tongue - in bags, but they just read lettuce. Oh well. I'm going to plant them all next year at the same time anyway. The coriander and dill, which you see above, are also saved for eating. I use a lot of dill seed in my pickles every year. I use some coriander and cook with coriander too, but I won't use nearly half of what I picked. I really should start doing less. Winnowing seeds is hard work. I wonder if my townhouse mates want any.

I have two patches of mustard growing for seed. Both are really experiments to see if they can be grown in another season besides spring. The above patch was planted in early August. I'm not sure it will have time to produce anything. We are going to start getting frosts soon. Typically by the middle of November the ground is frozen. The other patch was planted in late June. I picked some of the seeds on Saturday. I'll let them dry in the paper bag for a week to make sure they are well dry before I try to break open the pods and winnow them out. So the summer sowing was a success. The fall sowing not so much. Next year I've got the rotation set up so they can go in after the garlic which gets pulled about the first of July. I think that will work out well. And I'll have more space than I had this time.

And in other spice news, I finished drying the garlic and ground it up.

Then dried an onion and ground that up too. I love the smell of freshly dried onion. It smells like onion dip.

Harvest Monday, October 21st, 2013

The carrots are rolling in. I pick them whenever we run out in the house. Then I make them into carrot sticks so we always have something to munch on.

I picked the last of the winter squash. The second bed only had about 2/3rds what the first bed had. But a total of 50 pounds is pretty good for eating over the winter. Since my daughter is home I'll end up pureeing most of this. She likes her squash casserole. I make it about once a week for her. I also think it is about time for pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting. I'll probably make that when my MIL and son are in town at the beginning of November. Then I'll have lots of people to help me eat it.

Again I picked cucumbers. I still can't get over cucumbers in mid October. It is the last of them though as I pulled all the plants.

I did a small picking of the chard. I think I have one picking left before it gets pulled out. There is no sun at all on the bed anymore. So I doubt it will grow. It is just being held until I want more chard. But I'll pick it before the ground totally freezes up. That way I can clean the bed out before winter hits.

And I picked some more spinach. The spinach bed is really taking off. Since the spinach is in the circle garden it does get some sun during the day. And I covered it with netting fabric, so it was protected from the leaf miners (which really slow the plants down when they are small), but the netting lets a lot of light in compared to something like remay. Now if I can remember exactly what I did this year to repeat it next year. I like having fall spinach.

• Broccoli 0.13 lbs
• Carrots 2.41 lbs
• Cucumbers 1.83 lbs
• Greens 1.73 lbs
• Winter Squash 19.84 lbs
• Weekly Tally 26.25 lbs
• Yearly Tally 473.86 lbs, $942.84

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

Garlic Powder, Bean Burgers, and Double Digging

I've been busy the last couple of days. I ought to put all this in a couple posts, but I'm just going to get it all out quickly. This morning I started the process of making garlic powder. I sliced some garlic thin with the mandolin and put it in the dehydrator. I'll grind it up once it is dry. I used up the last of last year's garlic powder yesterday when I made some chicken and mushroom marsala. So it really had to get done.

Black beans and onions from the garden.

Also in the kitchen I made some bean burgers. I doubled the recipe though and used a bit more mushrooms and about twice the cilantro. Somehow I forgot to photograph the cilantro and it didn't get added to the tally.

I froze the burgers uncooked.

I did cook up one for lunch. I just love these bean burgers. They are so tasty. They don't hold together as well as your typical tvp veggie burger, but I like the texture. As you might suspect, that is not ketchup on my burger, but my homemade plum sauce. Maybe I will end up using all those black beans I harvested this year. Just the plain black beans were so yummy before they were put in. I still have a lot of mushrooms, so maybe tomorrow I'll make a black bean, mushroom, and beef soup.

I have no photos of the real work I've been doing in the garden. It is pretty boring to look at. Empty beds with compost spread on top. But I have been working. I decided when I started the garden that I would double dig one of my double beds each fall. I got one half done yesterday and the other done today. They were both spread with freshly sifted compost. I also spread compost on two more beds. One of the beds was the zucchini and cucumber bed. I decided they were through for the year. I did pick more cucumbers before ripping them out. Cucumbers in October is just weird, but I'm not complaining. I've enjoyed the long season.

I've got to get the rest of the compost sifted and out of the bins. I've got about two weeks before the big leaf fall. I've done two and a half of the bins and I have one and a half to go. Sadly I don't have many spots harvested to put it. My lettuce is all bolting now, so I'll probably be ripping that bed out next. My cabbage bed is getting harvested slowly. As is the carrot bed. I won't pick the last of that until November once the ground gets close to freezing. Not much is actually growing anymore. I went out just after noon today and the garden was in total shade. When I left at three it was still in total shade. I think it gets a tiny bit of sun at the beginning and end of the day, but very very little at this point. The sun is behind the trees and the neighbors' houses. So it is the end of the growing year, if not yet the harvesting year.

Harvest Monday, October 14th, 2013

My daughter got really excited about this harvest. She wants to eat her vegetables, but most greens aren't her thing. Carrots on the other hand she loves. So I picked a nice batch to eat this week. I'll be picking carrots every week for a while until sometime after the first frost. Then I'll harvest them all to store for the winter. The above carrots are Mokum. I also have SugarSnax in the garden, but they take longer to mature. They are full length, but still very narrow right now. I like it when they get about an inch in diameter. I hope they have enough time to fill out.

And I picked the first butternut squash this week. It was a good harvest in that bed. The other bed however had trouble germinating at the beginning of summer. So it is late even though it is Early Butternut. I hope it gets ripe enough to taste good. I've got about the same number of butternuts, but those are about half the size as Early Butternuts are small.

Though my broccoli has been disappointing this year I did get a few spears.

I did have a surprise harvest. I never thought my zucchini and cucumbers would produce anymore this late in the year. Who would have thought I'd get cucumbers in October? Needless to say I wasn't checking the zucchini so that big one got away from me. I see zucchini bread in my future.

The overwintering spinach was big enough to pick a small bit. I had it in a salad. Yum. I don't usually get spinach in the fall. Usually I put it in the ground too late for that, but it was seeded earlier that usual and the seed came up in the heat. I hope the larger plants will overwinter as well as smaller plants.

And last but not least were some kale, herbs, and kholrabi for my townhouse mates. The herbs were too small to really weigh. I tend to only weigh herbs when I pick a large amount.

• Broccoli 0.31 lbs
• Carrots 1.56 lbs
• Cucumbers 4.74 lbs
• Greens 1.73 lbs
• Summer Squash 4.61 lbs
• Winter Squash 31.11 lbs
• Weekly Tally 44.07 lbs
• Yearly Tally 447.61 lbs, $888.48

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

Starting the Fall Compost

One of the big chores every fall is dealing with the compost. It isn't a chore that is done in a day, but takes a while. And won't be done until my leaf bins are filled in November. I have two black plastic bins. The first is where our kitchen scraps go. When we add scraps we cover them with leaves to keep the flies away. The leaves also add carbon to the nitrogen rich scraps. The second plastic bin is for any finished compost at the end of the year. I have a small bit in there now, but I hope I have enough to fill it up when I'm done.

Then there are four pallet bins. The first two on the left are for making compost. Mostly with garden waste, lawn clippings, and leaves. The second two are mostly empty right now but are filled up every fall with leaves. Most of them will be used to add to the other bins as compost is made, but the excess is often broken down by our worms. At my last house this process would take about two years, but here it only takes one year. Technically it is leaf mold, but I use it just like compost. It won't have the mix of nutrients real compost has but it still is good organic matter. I don't make enough compost for all my beds, but with the extra leaf mold I can get close.

So I have a lot of different bins that have compost in them that have to be sorted through. Many people screen their compost, but I tend to just pick out the large pieces of undecomposed sticks or leaves and toss those back into the bin to be composted some more. I've already gone through the second pallet bin. Once the second bin was empty I started to turn over the first bin adding water as I went. Much of the bin was too dry as we haven't had nearly enough rain this summer or fall. I also added the top of the kitchen scrap bin in layers. The kitchen scrap bin is very wet as it has a cover and kitchen scraps are very moist. And the bin is always just filled with worms. It doesn't compost as much as it gets eaten by them. I don't add worms or anything in the spring. They just live here and multiply once it gets warm enough. So I layered that through the pile. I'm hoping the worms will take up residence in this bin now that it is wet enough. And then they will start to break it all down.

I didn't get it all done today. Right now I have four 4'x8'beds spread with compost. I've turned over most of that huge towering pile. I think it is supposed to rain tomorrow, so hopefully the rest of the pile will be turned on Saturday. Then I'll just have the leaf mold pile to sort through. As I put compost on the beds I clean them up. Many still have plants growing in them so that last pile will take a while to get all cleaned up. Occasionally I need to make a pile somewhere else in the garden to hold the compost. Because it all needs to be empty when the leaves start to fall. In the past I've found the best times to collect leaves from the neighbors are the first two weekends in November. So timing is always an issue since not all my crops will be out of the ground by November. Some crops even over winter. But their compost will be stored in that second plastic bin.

I knew I'd be adding compost to the two sisters beds. So the first one was picked and laid out to cure. It was nice and dry earlier this week but I had to bring them in this afternoon as we are getting rain. Where to put them is an issue now. I used to just put them on the floor of the dining room to cure. But the dog is too interested in them. So I've got them on the edges of the counter and my mantle. I'll need more space when I pick the second bed of squash.

And did you see the spinach in my overwintering bed? I've never gotten such nice fall spinach before. Ever. I planted earlier than usual. I hope it isn't too big and still overwinters well. But I'll be out picking that spinach soon. It looks so yummy. I do have gaps in that bed. I filled them in with some later planted seed. That is all up and I'll need to think the little plants out before they get much bigger.

Harvest Monday October 7th, 2013

My most interesting harvest this week is the sweet potatoes. I grew three kinds - Purple (left side, both top and bottom), Beauregard (top right), and Garnet (bottom right). I had 7 plants of Purple, 6 of Beauregard, and 4 of Garnet. As you can see the Purple yielded the best (2.5lbs/plant) and the Garnet the least (less than one pound/plant). Beauregard was in the middle (1.5 lbs/plant). My biggest sweet potato was a Beauregard which isn't in the photo as it was just outside the frame and it was 1.8 pounds. Purple came in second with 1.7 pounds. So some of those sweet potatoes are huge. The photo can be deceptive as it is such a wide view.

Last year Garnet yielded the best. I had trouble early on with the Garnet slips. The sweet potatoes are very slow to sprout in the spring. I finally got smallish slips rooted about a week later than the others were planted. So they were always behind. I tried to keep the other two from smothering the Garnet plants, but eventually I gave up. I think next year I'll start trying to root their slips very early on. Maybe in January instead of the beginning of March. I know they can do better than they did this year.

The other big harvest was the first of the kale. I froze most of it for the winter.

I also had a couple of harvest baskets with Asian greens.

One even had the first of the kholrabis in them.

My tally below also shows beans, though I have no photo. The first of the Jacob's Cattle beans were dry. When the rest are all dried out, probably in a week, I'll take a photo. They are very pretty beans. And I broke 400 pounds this week. My goal every year is one pound per square foot. So I try to get about 565 pounds. I have a feeling I'm just going to miss it. I've been behind all year long. And have gotten even farther behind as the year went on. I'll have to look closely at the tallies later in the year, but I know my zucchini, broccoli, spring cabbage were all disappointments.

• Beans 0.23 lbs
• Greens 5.45 lbs
• Greens, Asian 2.61 lbs
• Sweet Potatoes 30.15 lbs
• Weekly Tally 38.44 lbs
• Yearly Tally 403.54 lbs, $797.92

Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.