Harvest Monday, August 19th, 2013

The beans finally started to come in this week. The hand watering really did the trick. So they joined the zucchini and cucumbers in the harvest baskets. And as you can see the melons joined them.

It was definitely the week of the melon. Sadly melons always come ripe at the same time. I need to get two varieties that are ripen at different times. Ambrosia would do that. It is a great melon, but it doesn't always have time to ripen here. The above melons are Halona which is a cantaloupe and the bottom one is Sensation. The biggest of the cantaloupes was over six pounds. So they were good size melons this year

It has been a good melon season. Often we get a big rainstorm in August that cracks my melons before they are truly ripe, but this year the rain has held off at the appropriate time. It also means the melons don't get watery which can be a problem here. OK I say a good melon season, but the reality is that it has been the best melon season in the three years I've been growing in this garden. I've been very happy.

Sadly it was the last of the peaches this week. I'll miss them.

And the first patch of corn was finished up. I'll be picking the next batch this week.

A massive batch of chard was picked - over 17 pounds. I really shouldn't let my chard patch get away from me. It is easier to pick it at least every other week and freeze it in small batches.

A few odds and ends were picked. Some broccoli and some celery.

And last but not least the first of the dried beans was ready to be weighed. These are Tigers Eye beans. Not only are they the prettiest bean I've ever seen, but they are also one of the tastiest. Well really it is the texture. They are the smoothest, creamiest bean that I have ever tasted. Sadly they aren't all that prolific. I have some unshelled still, but I won't get more than a pound of beans in the end. And that was from a 4'x 8' bed. Though to be fair the beans had rust in them very early on so they did struggle to produce.

I'm finally feeling like it is summer and I'm having trouble keeping up with the harvests. Before I was wondering where my harvests were. I'm still about 150 pounds below normal for this time of the year. Mainly that means I'm not sharing as much as usual. I've yet to share any beans, cukes, or zucchini with my townhouse mates. Usually those are the summer staples to share when they come in heavily. I will be giving away some cukes this coming week though. All I need to do is make two jars of bread and butter pickles, then my pickling days are over for the year.

• Alliums 2.27 lbs
• Beans 3.23 lbs
• Corn 8.96 lbs
• Cucumbers 7.03 lbs
• Greens 17.88 lbs
• Melons 24.04 lbs
• Squash 5.80 lbs
• Weekly Tally 69.70 lbs
• Yearly Tally 251.03 lbs, $392.44
• Fruit
• Peaches 3.87 lbs
• Apples 0.28 lbs
• Rhubarb 2.89 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.

The Last Peach

I almost didn't want to eat it. It was the first year for peaches for me and I'm sad to see them go. But if I let it sit on the counter any longer it would have gone bad. It was a wonderful peach. Maybe not a Georgia peach, but for New England it was very good. Juicy and sweet. The peaches were a lot of work, but they were worth it.

In the spring I started an experiment with covering the peaches with a footie to prevent insects from attacking it. Well the covered ones all got brown rot. And the uncovered ones had no insects. They did have a few bird pecks. I ought to cover the tree with netting starting at the beginning of July. And I won't use footies. But all in all the New Red Haven tree preformed like a star. It was just its third year. Even with the massive losses due to the squirrels and brown rot, I picked 20 beautiful large peaches. The Reliance peach tree still hasn't produced. Well that is not really true. There is one peach on the tree right now. A very tiny little peach. It bloomed weeks later than the other tree. I got two varieties of peach trees to let them cross pollinate each other. Not that they need it but it supposedly makes them fruit better. The New Red Haven tree fruited so much I had to pull about 2/3s of the little fruit off during thinning. I don't think it needs any help.

The corn also had a transition of sorts. I sowed two beds with them. Last night the last corn from the first sowing was eaten. The next bed is just starting to get ripe. On Saturday I'll go out and check to see if we have any ready. But weirdly enough, I'm ready for a corn break. I've been eating about two ears of corn every night for a while now. But give me a couple of days and I'll want to eat them again.

And I finally had enough beans to make some three bean salad. I used the Ball Book recipe. Sort of. I left out the peppers of course. And I hate lima beans and don't grow them. I used Calypso beans instead. They are also called Yin Yang beans for their black and white markings. When they cook down they retain the markings, but they fade to brown. I wish my black beans had been ready in time, but they are still ripening. I don't have kidney beans or chickpeas, which are also traditional. I ended up with six jars, but one of them didn't seal so it didn't get its photo taken.

This afternoon I made another batch of zucchini bread. I used my traditional recipe but added two squares of baker's chocolate. I also left out the nutmeg, cloves, and allspice, but left in the ginger and cinnamon. It doesn't have all the chocolate chips of the other recipe so isn't as chocolatey. In fact it doesn't look like it has chocolate at all in it. It smells wonderful though. I can't wait to try it.

Canning

I spent the morning and a small bit of the afternoon canning today. The pickles were made with pickle crisp for the first time. I really do hate the mushiness of canned pickles. I've tried all the typical tricks like ice, salting, and starting just after you pick those cukes. And yes I always cut off the blossom end and leaves a bit of stem. But nothing ever works. I haven't yet done the low temperature canning. But if this doesn't work, it will be my next experiment. The thought of standing over the canning pot for 30 minutes and making sure the water stays at the appropriate temperature doesn't sound like a lot of fun though.

The other jars are barbeque sauce. Since I can't eat the tomato variety, I figured I'd experiment. I made peach BBQ sauce mostly following the Ball recipe. I did take out all the peppers. I also added some bourbon and made half the fruit plums. It does taste more like barbeque sauce than the other experiments, but I don't like it all that much. It is OK. I'll see what it tastes like on meat though to make sure. I really don't like the honey in the recipe. I want brown sugar. But honey is acidic (it varies but about a pH of 4), so I'm afraid to just replace it.

The browner sauce is Ball's Victorian Barbeque Sauce. Granny sent me the recipe. It is made from rhubarb and raisins. I used an immersion blender to break up the raisins and make it into a thick sauce. It doesn't taste much like barbeque sauce, but oh my gosh is it tasty. I just want to sit down and eat it straight. It reminds me more of apple butter than anything else. If I end up not liking it on meat, I think I'll bring out the ice cream and put it on top of that. Or just use it as a butter and put it on bread. In fact I think it would be to die for if I put it with some sharp cheddar. I'll have to try that too.

Tonight I'm going to do a test. I'm going to use the above sauces and some Chinese plum sauce that I made earlier to coat some chicken breast. I'll grill it. Then we will do a taste test to see which ones we like the best.

Two Sisters Success . . . For Now

We woke up early Saturday morning. We had the car half packed to go camping and wanted to get an early start. I wanted to be at the campground by 10am so we could join our friends that had gone up earlier in the week. I wanted to make sure I was there early enough to not miss the hike that they were going on that day. So I was up about 5:30. I went out to the garden to pick the corn to bring. As I walked out the door I immediately saw two raccoons. One was on the neighbor's stoop eating his garbage. The other was in my garden. My thoughts went straight to my sweet corn. Another neighbor said they quit growing corn because the raccoons always ate everything. I told them I'd had no trouble yet. So I checked my corn. None had been stolen. I know that one of the benefits of growing corn and squash together is that raccoons don't like the prickly squash plants. Since I've been in this house I've always grown a two sisters bed. I plant the squash at the ends of the beds (4'x16' beds) and the 10' in the middle of the bed is planted in corn. I train the squash to grow under the corn. So far not one of ears of corn has been stolen.

Before I left I also made some chocolate zucchini bread for the first time ever. Oh my it is good. Sadly not very good for me. My regular zucchini bread is much better. There is more zucchini, lots of applesauce, and I use whole wheat. I wonder if I could just add chocolate to my regular recipe. It probably wouldn't taste nearly as good though. I also did what Granny did and used the food processor to puree the zucchini before adding it. It really did make the texture wonderful. Much lighter than with grating the zucchini.

Breakfast yesterday featured the above bread along with my cantaloupe (the first of the year) and a peach. Yum.

And what do you do with fifteen pounds of chard? Well I blanched and froze it of course. And had it on pizza for dinner. The chard and broccoli patch really needed to be cleaned out, so I spent some time on that yesterday. I also pruned back my zucchini plants as I couldn't get through anymore to look for zucchini. They sure are growing well, but the female blossoms are mostly turning yellow and falling off before they open. I'm still getting enough zucchini though. Only one plant is producing anything, but it spits out one every few days. So once again no zucchini glut, but enough to eat. As is normal for me all my gluts come from my chard.

Harvest Monday, August 12th, 2013

My two harvest baskets this week were mainly zucchini and cucumbers.

And the photos did not by any means include all the cucumbers. I have lots of refrigerator dills now. This coming week I plan to can some pickles. But not many. I don't eat a lot of pickles in the winter. The monster above was made into cucumber salad after I cut out the middle seeds. I missed it because it was hanging off the end of the bed near the fence. Now I check that area too when I pick.

I wrote about them earlier last week, but more onions were put in the tally. Only part of the Ailsa Craigs are left to weight. I think I'll get to them this week.

But by far my favorite harvests were the peaches.

And the corn. (Again not all the harvests were photographed as I tend to pick it right before dinner.) Once the corn started to get ripe we were eating it every day. I'm growing Serendipity. It is strange. It is very long and very narrow. Not like your typical ear of corn. The taste is OK. But we don't love it like Ambrosia. Ambrosia is a much sweeter corn and both Joel and I like really sweet corn. I was trying a new variety because Ambrosia has trouble with germination. Serendipity doesn't. But Ambrosia might just be worth the trouble.

• Alliums 3.93 lbs
• Beans 0.07 lbs
• Corn 3.08 lbs
• Cucumbers 5.56 lbs
• Squash 2.01 lbs
• Weekly Tally 14.65 lbs
• Yearly Tally 181.33 lbs, $239.91
• Fruit
• Peaches 4.14 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.

Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Plums

First lets talk about the fall garden. The early morning was raining, but once it stopped I was out to plant up the fall garden. Above are my cabbages and kohlrabis. The starts are about two and a half weeks old, but big enough to go out. I put in 3 Fun Jen, 2 Michihili Chinese cabbage, 9 Early Jersey cabbage, and 11 kohlrabi. I really hope the earwigs will behave and leave the Michihili alone. They did a job on some of the spring Chinese cabbage.

The next bed was my Asian greens bed. I put in bok choy, tatsoi, and mizuna. I also put in seed for the same. I'm hoping to put in another succession in a couple of weeks. And another in September.

The kale went was put into two rows. One is Winterbor, and one is Dwarf Curly. In the middle I tossed some cilantro seed that was ripe in various parts of the garden. I'm hoping it will come up quickly, but it might not come up until fall.

In addition I put out some lettuce. Red Sails, Deer Tongue, Little Gem, and Summertime. They didn't get a row cover. And I suppose I ought to have put out the Summertime earlier, but vacations mess such things up.

Now on to the plums. Yesterday I was in the supermarket and they had plums for sale. I knew I wanted to make plum sauce, but I usually only buy plums from the farmers market as they tend to be a lot tastier. But I figured why not try them. I wanted to make two batches of sauce and each batch requires four pounds. So later in the day I bought an additional four pounds of plums from the farmers market. When you go to the farmers market at least they tell you what kind of plum you are getting - Queen Rosa. I wish my Green Gage plum tree would produce. The plums at the farmers market are $4/pound. Which means every pint of plum sauce I make will cost me $4 per jar just for the plums.

I made the two batches separately. I figured the Queen Rosa sauce would be so much tastier than the supermarket plums. I tasted them after I pureed them with a stick blender. The supermarket sauce was horribly sweet. The Queen Rose sauce was mouth puckering tart. So I tossed them in together and they made a very good sauce that way. I'm kind of surprised it worked out that way. But happy.

I used the Ball Blue Book recipe. Though I don't have my own plums yet, the onions and mustard seed were from my garden. Now if I could figure out why my plum tree is so unhappy.

Onions, Apples, and the Fall Garden

Yesterday I brought some of the Ailsa Craig onions in to the basement to dry. The red onions that were down there were braided and hung up. I now have all my storage onions braided up. I have five braids of Copra and three braids of Redwing.

I finally got around to fixing up the apple tree. I started with about 50 apples on the tree after I thinned it out (you can't see the whole tree here, this is the bottom part). But there are just 17 left (I think) after the squirrels. The first chore with the apple tree was to straighten it up as a wind storm - along with too many apples - knocked it against the fence. The second was to get the netting on to the bottom part of the tree. The top part that was against the fence was totally stripped of apples already. Sigh. At least the defenses on the peach tree seem to be working. I put netting all around it and the bottom is tacked down about every foot with u-pins. Hopefully the same strategy will work with the apple tree. Next year I'll have to get the tree protection on much earlier so I lose less fruit.

It is almost time to plant the fall garden. The seedlings are two weeks old and are getting hardened off. I think I might plant tomorrow morning since it will be cloudy and rainy the next two days. I've got two of the three beds prepped and two of the three row covers on too. The one in the photo is actually netting that you would buy in a fabric store. All it has to do is keep out the cabbage butterflies. I found it for $0.98/yard so hopefully it will work out. I haven't a clue how long it will last in the UV, but I'm hoping. I really do hate Agribon. If it lasts decently, I'll buy some more. I could use some wider material for my beds if I want them raised up more, but at 70" it works for the low hoops. Though right now I have the hoops only over part of the bed as I don't need both sides yet. I want to keep seeding every couple of weeks in this bed. Hopefully I'll do it. I have a tendency to not keep up with succession sowings.

Harvest Monday, August 5th, 2013

I harvested some herbs this week to dry. Some oregano (above) and some sage (below).

My harvest baskets are still nothing to write home about but at least they are more than one bean. I've been supplementing my diet still with frozen squash from last year and spring picked cabbage and carrots. But I want to eat beans - enough to get sick of them.

I harvested some garlic chive scapes for the first time. I've never used them, but hear they are a considered a treat in China. I suppose just like we consider garlic scapes a treat here. I found about half the ones I picked to be tough, so I tossed those out. I'll have to pick faster next time. So for those of you who do use garlic chive scapes, what do you use them in? (Help me Winnie.)

Most of the sweet onions (only a few photographed here though there were over 11 pounds of them) were weighed and put into the tally. I have a few still out in the garden. Once they are picked I've been storing them in the fridge as they go bad fairly quickly and my basement is still too hot for them.

The storage onions on the other hand were weighed and braided. I have some red onions braided too, but they aren't shown. I still have a few red onions drying. They aren't quite dry enough to braid. I do store these in the basement. The storage onions will be able to handle some warm weather and not rot.

And my peaches have started to come in. They are so delicious. I do have to cut off the bad spots occasionally, but some of them are perfect all the way around.

• Alliums 32.04 lbs
• Beans 0.10 lbs
• Cucumbers 2.21 lbs
• Herbs 0.64 lbs
• Squash 0.91 lbs
• Weekly Tally 35.87 lbs
• Yearly Tally 168.65 lbs, $216.02
• Fruit
• Peaches 3.93 lbs
• Gooseberries 0.88 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.

My Favorite View in the Garen

You have to love early August in the morning light. All the plants are trying to take over the garden. My major job is turning the ends of the cucurbits and sweet potatoes back into their beds so they don't take over the world and I can actually walk down my path. The path above is a three foot wide straight path. Not that it looks straight from the photo. It looks like a pretty curving path and most of it is just a foot or so wide with all the flowers and plants in the path. Some of my side paths are even worse. They are all green. I have to be careful where to step.

Though it might not be a view, this is my current favorite bee, mainly because it is the most prolific bee in my garden is this all black fuzzy bee. It is about the size of a typical honey bee, maybe a bit shorter and wider. I'm currently trying to figure out what kind of bee it is. It looks a little like a black carpenter bee, but I always thought carpenter bees were larger. I know the Eastern Carpenter bees that we get are huge and aren't fuzzy like this bee is. They love the corn, the cucurbits, and the beans. The actual honey bees seem to be sticking to my mustard plants and zinnias right now. And as Granny has noticed, it has been a good bee year, well bee and wasp year. I've seen several varieties of wasps I've never seen before. Including a huge blue black one. I've had smaller blue black ones in the garden in the past, but they only got to about an inch and a quarter maybe. This one gets over an inch and a half and its width can be over 1/4 inch. A very big wasp. Another is interesting because it has almost a translucent orangish abdomen with a black thorax.

This is my favorite bee's favorite spot, my two sisters' garden. It is one of my favorite spots in the garden too as the corn is almost ripe. I can't wait.

And the squash is just starting to set. Go butternuts. Those black bees keep them well pollinated.

My other cucurbits are doing well. The melons have set at least 7 and they are big. Above are my zukes and cukes. I've never had my zukes this big before. They are four feet tall. I wish I had planted my cukes somewhere else. The row cover worked fabulously to keep off the vine borers. But now those three zucchini are very hard to control. I keep trying to loop them back into the middle of the bed.

I'm trying to keep them away from my carrots which are tiny little things. The zukes keep trying to smoother them. As you can see the carrots needed thinning, so I thinned and weeded them today.

Then I got their row cover on. Sweet potatoes are to the right. And do you see that nice looking spot behind the sweet potatoes that has just a few dill plants?

Well earlier today it looked like this. I pulled all the Tiger's Eye beans out and planted some yellow mustard. It is an experiment to see if the yellow mustard can produce before the frosts hit. I would love to keep growing mustard seed, but it takes a lot of space for very little production. So the hope is that it can produce as a fall crop. If it can, I have plenty of space to give it.

And speaking of fall crops. The fall peas have come up.

And the beans are starting to come up too. I was very worried about them as the skunk had dug up this section of beans before they had broken the surface. I'm sure he was looking for insects. Interestingly enough he had dug up the yellow jacket area in the rock wall garden. Now I need to fill in that hole sometime at night when the jackets aren't active. The skunk didn't eat any of the bean sprouts. Sadly I planted the sprouts back into the ground unevenly. So I'll have some gaps. But as long as I get some beans. I'll be happy. I figured the other beans aren't producing because they are under water stress, so I hand watered them today. The rest of the garden doesn't need water, but that bed just doesn't do well with overhead sprinkler watering. I think the leaves just shed the water onto the path.

Damn Squirrels

This is my dwarf fruit trees' third year, so two of the five of them have begun to fruit. I've put bird netting around my peach tree. The damn squirrel eats about one or two a day. My apple tree isn't faring any better. I used to have 50-60 fruit on the peach tree, but between the brown rot and the squirrels there is less than half left. The netting doesn't seem to help much. So far the squirrels have found a way in every day. I can tell from the half eaten peaches I find on the ground. But they have started to ripen slowly. I picked six more today.

Though it kills me to give them away as they are so good and not numerous, I split them with my townhouse mates. There are parts of the yard that are mine and I can do what I want with the area and eat everything (the rock wall garden and my fenced in vegetable garden). And there is the rest of the yard, which we both paid for and we all do the work for. I do tend to do more of the work than the others as it is honestly easier to do most of it than tell them what to do. Plus my townhouse mates do things on their schedule not on the plants' schedules. And many of the chores I do have to be done at certain times. Basically I do everything except mow and trim the grass, and some of the weeding. Technically all of the weeding should be done by my townhouse mates, but I do weed here and there. They miss things. They can't tell a weed from a perennial that we planted. We tend to let the Dutch clover grow where it wills. Then the wood sorrel started to take over . To me they don't look anything alike, but they thought it was clover. And they don't get under the plants well enough. I cut down a 4' tall maple growing out of our mountain andromeda. Heck even I missed that one until it was 4' tall and I'm pretty good with finding hidden weeds.

Anyway there are still peaches in there. I tried to buff up the defenses this morning. I hope they work. I really wish I'd have enough peaches to preserve them. Canned peaches for the winter would be so nice. As would peach butter. And peach sauce (like plum sauce but with peaches). Oh the things I could do. For now I'll dream of squirrel stew and try to figure out where he gets in next time.

Yesterday I spent dealing with my gooseberries. I had one plant that needed to come out. It might give out really large berries and be semi thornless, but they are not prolific and they taste insipid (Tixia). My favorite of the two gooseberries that I had left was Hinnomaki Red. This plant has fairly draping branches. And everywhere they touch the ground they root. So I took one rooted cutting and planted that one instead. Since the plant drapes too much, it drags a lot of the fruit into the soil. I wanted to get them up and off the ground.

I've decided to grow the two plants as standards. So I've started their training. I'll get them up to about 2 1/2' off the ground I think before I'll let them branch out. Maybe just two feet.

In the middle of the two standards, will be Invicta which I'll keep as a ground based bush. It seems to be able to hold up its fruit just fine.

Interestingly enough as I viciously pruned the gooseberry plant I found the plant covered in ripe gooseberries. I told my townhouse mates to pick them and eat them when I was gone as they were almost ripe when I left. They didn't. So I have a nice little pile. Many had fallen off already, but I got about two cups of ripe berries.

My cucumbers are starting to come in too. So I made up some more pickle brine for the fridge. I put in dill heads, onions, and garlic from the garden. I also added some spices. As I have extra cucumbers I'll add them to the juice. Refrigerator pickles are the best kind of pickle. They don't ever get heated so they are very very crisp. I don't even soak them in salt like you would for a canned pickle. They just don't need it. You can use any quick pickle brine that you like to make them. I tend to make them as dills, but keep wondering if I ought to branch out more.