Harvest Monday, March 10th, 2014

This unassuming dinner of turkey meatloaf caused me problems.

Do you see this?

And this? Well they were the last of my onions and carrots and they went into this dinner. The onions in the meatloaf and the carrots as a side. The carrots were starting to sprout tops and roots. I guess they thought winter was over. So I decided it was time to finish them off.

For the rest of the week I had to use store bought onions. So sad. It will be a while before I can eat my own again. I'll buy a huge bag of carrots for my husband's birthday party this weekend and then I'll have carrots to munch on again. You know spring is coming when I start to run out of things. I wonder what I'll run out of next?

Luckily my supply of sweet potatoes and greens seem to be never ending. I could eat a mass of greens at every meal. I don't do a lot with them most of the time as I love them with just some balsamic vinegar on them. Sometimes I'll put them into some of the things I make, but the reality is that I can only put so much into a dish without it overwhelming the dish. And I'd prefer to eat more of them than that. And I can't make a dish like that when my husband is home as then he won't eat it.

Yet more sweet potatoes and greens, but this time orange sweet potatoes and kale instead of the purple and chard.

Last night we had enchiladas. I made separate dishes to keep all the food issues apart. For my daughter I made one with chicken, beans (from the garden), and lots of cheese and the typical red enchilada sauce. My husband had chicken, beans, and a little low fat cheese with the red sauce. I had one with chicken, lots of cheese, and a sour cream cilantro sauce (cilantro and garlic from the garden). And of course I had a side of greens with mine. Can't have too many greens. I think next week I'll have to eat some of the non-greens in the freezer.

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.

Slowly Planting

Weather in the northeast corner of the US is cold. I checked the records from my weather station and it is the coldest winter we have had so far. And March is just being weird. So far the average temperatures in March have been lower than in January or February. So things aren't melting out quickly. Our saving grace is that the sun is getting stronger. That by itself is melting out some of the snow. It retreats a little more every day. We will be getting a light warmup over the weekend getting our temperatures closer back to norms (highs in the low 40Fs and lows in the high 20Fs). Which is a nice change from what we've been getting (highs around 30F and lows in the single digits and teens).

I decided to wait about a week past my normal planting time to start the lettuce, small Asian greens, and parsley. I also haven't started as many as I usually do. I think I'll wait and plant these again. If the weather sticks to the frigid temperatures that it has been, the soil won't be unfrozen until April.

Don't you wish Mother Nature would be a little more predictable? Three years ago we had the winter of massive snow. Two years ago we had the winter that wasn't. And this year we have the winter that won't go away. It makes it hard to know when spring will really get here. I like to plan things out in the garden. Timing is everything to get the most of out my space. But I'll just have to go with the flow on Mother Nature's little joy ride.

Harvest Monday, March 3rd, 2014

I'm a little late getting my Harvest Monday up. I guess it is kind of like not being ready for a party when people start to show up. With my memory as bad as it is (and my family will tell you it is really bad) I'm surprised it hasn't happened more often. But here goes. Dinner number one is pot pie with a biscuit topping. From my preserves it has celery, carrots, onions, and sage.

Next comes shrimp with lobster sauce. Well sort of. It has turkey instead of pork. My husband declared it yummy. It just has garlic from the garden. But the sides of kale and broccoli are both from the garden.

I usually don't get to make pineapple dishes as my husband hates all the tropical fruits. I can get away with cooking with the more northern fruits, but not the really yummy ones. Since he wasn't home I could make what I wanted. Again it was just garlic in the main dish with spinach for a side.

Last but not least was a nice turkey breast dinner with the fixings. The cranberry sauce is homemade, but nothing from the garden. The dressing has onions, celery, and spices from my stash. And the sides were spinach and squash.

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.

Spring Is Being Slow This Year

Usually in the Boston area we plant our peas on St. Patrick's Day (March 17th). As you can see we are still covered in snow. That isn't all that unusual. What is unusual is that we are getting some single digit temperatures the next couple of nights since we are in the middle of a cold spell. Even the long range temperatures are frigid. We aren't quite hitting record cold temps but usually our normal lows are in the high 20Fs and our highs are around 40F at the end of February. We did have a very short warm spell earlier and it did melt out some of the snow. As you can see the taller of the kale is now sticking out from under. I hope it doesn't mind yet another arctic blast.

One of the garnet sweet potatoes that I started earlier is starting to sprout a bit. And I started two Beauregard and two Purple sweet potatoes.

I went through my seeds now that they have all been delivered and put them in order. You can see I make out a sheet that tells me when to start my seeds indoors. This is not a hard and fast chart. In fact I was supposed to start some seeds this week, but I think I might wait a bit more. I don't think the ground will be unthawed by the solstice. If it were a warm winter I would start hardy spring things a bit early.

I use my sheet to sort my seeds. I take the ones I'm starting indoors and put them in order based on their start date. I have a similar sheet for seeds that get direct sowed. I keep that box upstairs in the plant nursery during the seed starting season. When I'm done with a bunch of them they get put back in the other box based which I sort based on type (like brassicas, cucurbits, and greens).

So for now the only plants I have growing are my onion seedlings. And I'll play it safe and wait another week to start my other seeds. I'm beginning to get impatient for spring.

Milk and Mushrooms

Oatmeal left, Almond right

So food is off topic if it doesn't involve my harvested produce, but I thought I'd talk about a couple of things anyway. The first is milk. I'm lactose intolerant so I don't use cow's milk in my cooking usually. I used soy for a while. I tried making my own soy milk, but I hated the taste. I finally got fed up with it and switched off of it. But before I did that I had to find a new "milk".

I tried oat milk. Both my husband and I weren't fond of that. So I moved to almond milk. It was delicious and much easier to make than my attempt at soy milk as it doesn't need to be cooked. It is pretty simple. I use a cup of almonds that I soak for a day or two, changing the water when I think of it. Then I grind them up with fresh water in my blender for a minute or two. I strain it with cheese cloth and put it in a quart jar. Then I add water to the top since it usually isn't quite there. So simple. But you do have to think ahead. And sadly my husband hates almonds. So now we have two jars of milk in the fridge. I use his cow juice for baking things he will eat and I eat them too. Usually there isn't enough milk to cause problems for me in baked goods.

You might notice I don't add sugar, salt, or vanilla to my milk. I have always hated those flavored overly sweet milks which is weird since I have a sweet tooth, but not in my milks I guess. It is better for me anyway.

So I'm off of soy milk for now. Most people do it for the cost and like my issues with flavored milks, the ability to control what goes in them. The impetus for me to do this was winter. I don't have a car. So shopping for liquid items means I have to carry them. In the summer I use my bike and it isn't a problem. But in the winter it is just too dang heavy. A few package of almonds is so much lighter.

My other totally off topic food is mushrooms. Specifically wood ear mushrooms, which are one of my favorite of the mushrooms. This is also often called black fungus. Though wood ear mushrooms sounds more appetizing doesn't it? I get them occasionally from our local hot pot restaurant. Yum. But there isn't any place here to get them easily on foot. I could go into Chinatown. I'm sure I could get anything there, but it would probably take about an hour to get in on the subway. I'm spoiled. I like things close that I can walk to. That way I get my exercise and my food.

But I really wanted to make some mooshi. The recipe I had called for dried wood ear mushrooms and dried lily buds. So I found them on Amazon* and ordered them. The lily buds were an epic fail. They tasted like nothing. But the above dried mushrooms* owned (note to self: never play computer games right before writing a blog post).

After experimentation I found that putting just half of one of those tiny blocks into a pint jar of water was more than enough for mooshi. They really are the amazing expanding mushrooms.

This is what they are like after 24 hours. They totally fill the jar and the mushrooms go back to their original shape. And the taste is awesome. I even save the water they soak in. I've been using to replace some of the broth in my dishes that have mushrooms.

*Disclaimer: I've received no compensation from anyone discussed in this blog page.

Harvest Monday, February 24th, 2014

Lunches this week were mostly soups. I'm slowly using up the cabbage soup that I made last fall. I would happily eat this twice as many times if I had enough in the freezer. Also since it is premade it is an easy lunch. If nothing is in the fridge and I'm starving I can just grab cabbage soup.

Then I made some beef stew with a lot of vegetables from the freezer. In addition to the four cups of frozen veg you see here (grated zucchini, celery, and butternut squash), there were two onions from the garden.

I don't actually add a lot of beef to my stew compared to vegetables. I used a quart of beef stock and a half pound of stew beef. Unlike most people who keep their beef in large chunks, I cut mine into cubes about a centimeter wide. That way I get small cubes of beef in most bites. What gives the most texture to the soup is the mushrooms from the store that I mince up. But even when cooked for about two hours they have a bite to them.

Bean burgers with Boston baked beans, carrots, and pickles. This was the first jar of pickles I opened up and I'm declaring them a success. I used Pickle Crisp (calcium chloride) in my pickles for the first time. I usually don't like home canned spears as they are so mushy, but this worked. They were nicely crisp.

The cashew chicken actually had very few of my home preserved ingredients. Just garlic I think. Oh wait. And celery too.

I'm still working on finding a substitute for tomato based spaghetti sauce. I used a cheesy sauce this time. I love it as mac and cheese, but it didn't hold up to spaghetti. I'm thinking I should just make a batch of mac and cheese and freeze it as i love that. Then I could have it as my pasta when my husband has spaghetti. But he can't have the cheese and I can't have the tomatoes so we just aren't fitting in where pasta is concerned.

And in my attempt to get my husband to eat more salmon I tried making salmon patties for the first time. I fried them in olive oil. Olive oil has a low smoke point so you have to be careful not to get it too hot. But it works well once you learn how to do it - and use very high quality oil. Not adulterated oil. But you can taste if your olive oil is high quality or not. I picked the brand I like by a taste test.

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.

Harvest Monday, February 17th, 2014

Looking out my front window

We saw a lot of snow last week. So no harvests. But as usual I did use up some of my saved harvests from last year.

This is my wonton soup. Now none of the vegetables you see in this were from the garden. I do have carrots, but I was using up some bought carrots from a party as I don't have a lot of mine left. But the wontons, which I swear are in there, are made with my garden vegetables.

Pizza is a favorite food of most people in the US. But I can't eat tomato sauce, so I'm always trying something weird. I think my last experiment was the best. I started with cranberry sauce - homemade, but not homegrown, layered that with some pureed squash that was cooked down to get rid of all the excess water, and added a layer of squeezed out spinach. The cheddar cheese was layered on very thinly. But oh my gosh. This was a pizza made in heaven. Oh so good. I'll have to make more. I think I might have to make some cranberry sauce next fall (can I get cranberries still?) that are a bit less sweet. I think the squash adds a lot of sweetness too and the cranberries for this need less sugar than what I put on my chicken and turkey. From the garden we had squash, spinach, and a pinch of oregano.

Since that turned out so well I tried layering a wrap with cranberry sauce, chicken, purple sweet potatoes (from the garden), and cheese. That wasn't nearly as good. I think what made the pizza so good was the smooth almost buttery squash (though there was no butter in there).

You can see here I was using up the leftover spinach and squash from the pizza (the green beans are also from the garden). I freeze them in packets and the pizza didn't need them all so I just ate them the next night. But the main dish was a seafood risotto. My goal for this winter was to try to get some vegetables into my veggie hating husband. My plain vegetables he won't touch as he doesn't like the texture of them. So I've been seeing what I can hide inside a meal. The risotto has onions (from the garden), mushrooms, and Chinese cabbage pureed before adding to the rice. Though it is far from a culinary masterpiece, it came out decent. I've never made risotto before. I'll probably make it again.

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.

Harvest Monday, February 10th, 2014

The garden is locked in snow still. Though I do have that path shoveled to the compost pile. Right now the "compost" is frozen as is typical in the winter. But since I'm still cooking, I still make scraps.

I did finally cook up some more squash.

Those got divided up into cup+ portions and put in the freezer. We did use one to make some squash casserole for my daughter. I swear she would eat that every day if I made it. But I don't have nearly enough squash for that.

I thought for the cooked food I'd show you some of my lunches. Some like this are filled with my garden produce. Onions, garlic, and lots and lots of Chinese cabbage. Yum.

Others have a little less and more bought produce. This had my black beans and some garlic, but not much else.

And this is my favorite lunch photo. Isn't it colorful? This contained garlic from the garden that I mashed into the avocado. And to the side we have sweet potato salad with my sweet potatoes, red onions, and mustard from the garden.

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.

Harvest Monday, February 3rd, 2014

As typical this time of the year, I've got no harvests so the post is all about using my stored vegetables (and beans). This week was the week of the mashed sweet potato. They are so easy to make except for peeling them. I steam them with their skins on in the microwave. I put a little water at the bottom of the bowl and cover with an inverted plate. Typically three minutes is long enough then I let them sit for a few minutes more. I add a little butter, salt, and water or broth and mash them with a fork. Yum.

My dinners tend to have two vegetables in them. One green vegetable and one some other color. So it is usually carrots, squash, or sweet potatoes. But last week I seemed to only want mashed purple sweet potatoes for some reason.

This week I'll have to roast some squash to start getting a bit more variety in my food. But I did have one squash meal. We had spaghetti and since I can't eat tomato sauce, I had squash sauce. I'm OK with the sauce, but it is just OK. It doesn't get me excited at all. I like pesto, but I don't want to eat it on a regular basis. All the fat messes with my system.

And my sweet potato kick didn't stop with my house. I cooked some up for the Superbowl.

Since I can't eat chili I brought black bean and sweet potato soup. Which is probably a good thing as there were four different chilis at the party. And since it was vegan anyone could eat it.

Also featured in the chili was some green coriander - they look greener in real life. One of my other blogging friends (Michelle maybe?) talked about how good green coriander was compared to the mature harvested seed. And I so concur. The green one is more complex and much stronger. I'll have to remember to pick more at this stage this year.

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.

On Your Mark, Get Set, . .

GO! Gardening season is off. It might be 15F outside right now. Brrrr! We might be in a bad cold snap. And the ground will probably be frozen for another month and a half. But I'm thinking of warmer times. The first out of the gates was the Garnet sweet potatoes. Though I don't have them on the windowsill as you see here. I've got them by the fridge where it is marginally warmer.

Garnets don't break dormancy well I've found. They were about a month or so behind my Purples and Beauregards last year, so I decided to start them in January instead of the beginning of March. They usually are very productive, but they got put in late last year and the other plants that had been in for a week over took them and pretty much smothered the poor things. This year I want to give them a chance.

Next up are my onions. I planted my bunching onions in the back small container with just randomly scattered seed. Then I made two full flats of 1 1/2" soil blocks. Sadly I used some seed from 2011 as my Redwing seed hasn't shown up yet. It is on backorder. I hope it sprouts. But if it doesn't I'll redo the blocks when the rest of my seed gets here. Typically I buy onion seed every year or two as the seed doesn't keep its viability long. Three years is pushing it.

One flat was nothing but Copra. It is my mainstay storage onion. Half of the next flat was Ailsa Craig a sweet onion, and the other half was the aforementioned Redwing, which is a good red storage onion. I ought to put more into Copra and less into Ailsa Craig. That onion can only keep for about 2 months. And 36 very large onions (and yes they get very very large) is doable, but hard to go through. Last year I got more poundage out of these onions than the other two combined in 1/3 of the space. I wish onions froze well, but I just don't like frozen onions.

The onions were put under some cool white fluorescent shop lights. Since these are long day onions I have the lights on for about 12 hours. That will keep them from bulbing up prematurely. I'll put them out in early April. Starting onions from seed is a PITA. They take a long time to get to a reasonable size. And I need a lot of them to fill a bed. I keep thinking our area needs a bulk buy from Dixondale Farms. If you buy in bulk it is pretty inexpensive. But I'd have to find enough people that want to go in on it. I think about 10 bunches would make it cost effective over growing them under lights (two months of a shop light costs about $7-$8 I think, not to mention seed and soil costs). With 10 bunches it would only be $4.28 for 50-75 plants. I'd want about 2 bunches myself. Though that would be splitting a couple of the bunches if I kept my sweet and red onion level at half my yellow onion level. Sadly I don't know of any place here that sells onion plants cheap.

Hmm Are there any other Bostonians out there that would come to East Arlington for a bulk buy (3/4 mile from Alewife subway stop, on the 77 bus line, and 1 mile from Route 2)? If so I'll collect names and emails and ask again come November to see if people are still interested. If so send me an email at daphne@alum.mit.edu. And tell me about how many bunches you would want - as low as a 1/2 and as high as you need (this is not a commitment, but just to get an idea if it is feasible). It can't happen this year as I've already ordered my seeds, and I'm just thinking about it now. But oh it would be nice to not have to do onion starts every year.

Harvest Monday, January 27th, 2014

Salmon and fava beans in a mushroom tarragon sauce with a side of spinach*

Every year I redo my side tally bar. And every year it starts out very negative. This year it starts at $-401.02. Ouch. The reality is that I spent most of that money to build the garden. I amortize costs that go over multiple years. Like the wood and hardware to build my beds. The soil that was put in the beds. And the other odds and ends that I use that last, like bamboo and the now useless tomato cages that I ought to sell to someone that could actually use them (but I maintain a weird denial about not eating tomatoes and don't want to believe that I can never eat them again - I'm sure at some point I'll get over it). I even add in the fertilizer costs since I buy big bags and use them over time. Most of these expenses will disappear over time as the minimum amount of time I expect the item to last will have expired.

Bean burger with steamed purple sweet potatoes and green beans*

Since I haven't shown it in a while I'll show you the table I have right now:

Description	Years	Cost	Cost/year	Year Bought	Year Expires
Bamboo	4	261.50	65.37	2011	2015
Nofa	2	236.83	118.41	2013	2015
2x6x8	5	386.92	77.38	2011	2016
Screws	5	42.52	8.50	2011	2016
Corner brace	5	101.66	20.332	2011	2016
Composter	10	50.00	5	2010	2020
Tomato cages GHS	20	86.06	4.303	2010	2030
Tomato Cages TC	20	274.30	13.72	2010	2030
soil	30	223.13	7.44	2011	2041
concrete bricks	30	24.30	0.81	2011	2041

As you can see a huge portion of the cost of the garden was from the wood that makes up the garden and the bamboo poles. NOFA is the Northeast Organic Farmers Association. They do bulk buys every year for things like fertilizer, potting soil, netting, etc. I participate occasionally and buy more than I need. Though I've amortized though this year, I'm guessing I'll be set for at least another year after that.

So if you add all those costs/year up I come up with 321.28. This year I've only spent 79.74. Which is actually more than typical for me and seeds. I ought to control myself more where seeds are concerned, but you just know that isn't going to happen.

Black bean and sweet potato soup with a whole wheat quesadilla*

You might have noticed that I've been better about photographing my meals this week, but I was also better at planning. At the beginning of last week I actually made a menu that goes out three weeks. I like to cook, but I just hate figuring out what I'm going to make for dinner. So now I have something to follow. Though I've written it down I reserve the right to play with my food when I want and change it. Sometimes I get things into my head and I want to do something new.

This week my new thing was the first photo above. I've been trying to get more fish into our diets due to health concerns. But buying fresh fish from the store in winter is a pain. I don't have a car. And this January has been really cold. So I was trying to make a healthy meal from canned salmon. I think it turned out well. It is made with soy milk and don't tell my husband but there are vegetables ground up in the sauce. Oh and he didn't get any fava beans. Not his cup of tea. It was still good for him though.

*All of the vegetables and beans shown above are from my stores - even the tarragon from the salmon dish.

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.

And Yet More Fruit

I've been thinking a lot about what to do about next year in several areas. The major two being fruit related. I've slowly added fruits to my garden over the years. The majority came in 2011 when the yard was finished. But last year I looked sadly at my Green Gage plum and wondered if it would ever bloom. It is a poor, sad tree. The aphids like to take it over and it hasn't been healthy. I do spray it with insecticidal soap when it gets bad. But after reading about it I found that the European plums tend to have more trouble. I know I love the Japanese plums as that is what they sell in the farmers markets. I should have taken that as a hint about what grows well around here. I'm not quite at the point of giving up on the Green Gage, but I really wanted to see if a Japanese variety would grow better.

So I thought about what spot I could tuck a tree into. Plums typically are about 20 feet tall and our yard is totally planned and planted. So it had to be in the vegetable garden. I've grown less fond of the sunflowers over the years, but I like to have something tall along the southwest wall of the house. It at least pretends to keep us cooler since we lack shade (the flaw of having a vegetable garden against the southern part of the house). I've thought about growing vines up the wall. But that is bad for the longevity of the house. So maybe a tree would work.

The area in question is only 3' across and right against the foundation. The path goes right next to this. I really don't want a standard sized tree as it wouldn't grow correctly. So I finally decided on a shorter plum. A Weeping Santa Rosa. It doesn't produce the prodigious quantities of fruit a real Santa Rosa can produce, but the fruit is supposed to be even better. And it is self pollinating. It only gets 8'-10' high naturally, so I can probably keep it pruned to 7'-8' easily enough. I thought about pruning it to an espalier, but I honestly think contorting the plum to a linear shape would be easier than that. Instead of 3-4 main branches, I'll have two that go along the line of the house. I might need some support early on to get the main branches to go where they need to go, but once the main branches are set, the tree ought to be easy to keep pruned. At least that is my hope.

Another problem is my strawberries. I have some disease that is killing off my strawberry plants. Earliglow seems much less affected though its production has lowered a lot. Whatever it is doesn't seem to affect the figs, pears, or apples. The plum is a poor sick thing, but doesn't seem to show signs of verticillium (lower branches dying - I tend to have more trouble with the newer growth where the aphids love to be). So maybe it is red stele. Or maybe not. I'm going to replace Sparkle with Surecrop. Not as tasty maybe, but more reliable. I'll probably remove all plants from the plum section just in case it is verticillium as the stone fruits are so susceptible. At my last house I never had disease problems in anything really. The soil was so clean. But it was also clay with its inherent problems. This sandy loam we have here grows things so well, but I swear there are so many diseases. I don't know if it is from the soil itself or the warmer area with everyone and their gardens so close.

And since I had spent yet more money on fruit I decided I needed to update my tally for 2014. It is the new year after all. It really seems every year I spend more and more money on fruit, but still haven't seen the payback. I have in the little fruits. Even the dying strawberries more than paid for themselves. At some point I'm going to have to quit buying fruit trees. Though I'd still love a persimmon. And I so wish I could have two paw paw trees, but there are certainly no spots for two large trees (a very under used tree that is so delicious). The persimmon might happen though. I'm sure there are small persimmons out there. Maybe if my Paradisio fig never ripens any fruit or if I give up on the Green Gage plum a persimmon could go there.

Harvest Monday, January 20th 2014

This is a hard time of the year to be hosting Harvest Monday. I won't see a harvest for months. And though I am eating from my preserved stash, none of my recent meals have inspired me to take a lot of photos. It is just same old, same old. I have been having fun with making crackers, but no great successes. Though my last attempt had my husband happy. Of course crackers aren't from the garden. I'm also trying to transform some of my recipes to healthier versions.

Turkey meatloaf, purple sweet potatoes, kale

Take meatloaf. It has always been a family favorite. I finally got a version that we all liked that didn't have tomatoes (since I can't eat them). Then several months ago I decided I needed more fiber and made a version that was vegetarian. It was just OK. I think all bean "meat"loaf has a weird texture. I'd eat it but the rest of the family wouldn't even try it when the regular version was on the table too. So I'm trying to work out a turkey version. The two versions I made the other night were decent. One was all turkey and the other had black beans substituting for half of the ground turkey. I liked the bean version best. Half beans and the texture is right and the meatloaf is more moist. Now I just have to not over cook it next time. Maybe next week I'll try again and tweak it a bit too.

So I'm hoping my posters do better than I. In the middle of January with a long winter still ahead, I could really use some eye candy so I can dream about next year's garden and harvests.

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.

Harvest Monday, January 13th, 2014

This last week or so has really been a seesaw of temperatures here. I keep hoping my plants can all survive this. We got down to negative temps (in F not C, -18C=0F), then it went back up to the 50Fs. The next day it was in the single digits again. Then we got a high of 57F. Just wild swings. We keep swinging back and forth from our typical lowest lows to our highest highs. The plants just have to hate that. I hope my rosemary lives. And I'm trying not to think about my poor fig trees.

Though nothing is getting picked in the garden, I am eating from it as you can see above. The top photo is a bean and mushroom burger with some Boston baked beans, pickles, and chard. The only thing not homemade was the bun. I used to make my own buns, but recently I've been buying them as the last three bun attempts had me burning them. I know how easy they are to make. But I seem to be cursed. The bottom photo is some cabbage soup. I put up a lot of it since I had so much Chinese cabbage and I'm really happy about it now. The biscuit is a kale and cheese biscuit that I made ages ago. They seem to hold up to freezing well too.

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.

Harvest Monday, January 6th, 2014

I'm not here right now, but you can all have fun without me. Happy New Year!

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.