Harvest Monday - 29 November 2010

Not much got harvested this week. I have plenty of Asian greens still out there, but except for Thanksgiving there wasn't much cooking going on this week. I still have plenty of Asian greens from the week before in the fridge. It is really hard for one person to eat up almost five pounds of greens in a week.

I only picked one bunch of Fun Jen on Thanksgiving. I made a fruity Asian salad. No photos were taken as I barely had time for anything that morning. The above photo is what is still left of that head of Fun Jen in my fridge.

• Greens 0.63 lbs
• Spent this week: $0
  
• Total harvested this week 0.62 lbs
  
• Total for the year 345.58 lbs
  
• 2010 Tally $880.94
  

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.

This and That

I haven't had much time to write so I'll do a quick post on what has been going on. The first is that we finally got our fence in. I can't wait to have a rose growing over the arbor.

The second is that we had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We had way too much food. Everyone brought enough to feed at least twice as many as themselves and that means the tables were still full when we were done. My son made two dishes this year so I didn't make as much as usual. I did decide that I needed to bring Asian greens so I made a salad with them. Also from the garden were my pickles. And I brought a lox plate. The lox were on a bed of my red lettuce. I also had red onions, Cherokee Purple tomatoes, and pickled serranos as sides to the lox - all from the garden. It was one of the few dishes that was actually finished at the meal. But that was because it was an appetizer and people hadn't stuffed themselves yet. I swear I meant to take photos. But alas I don't even have photos of the Asian green harvest.

Then I noticed yesterday my garlic is coming up.

This I could take photos of as I wasn't rushed.

I suppose I could give you more garlic photos, but really, do you need 20 of them? I think not.

My garden catalogs have started arriving, but so far no Pinetree or Fedco catalog. I hope they come soon.

I hope those of you who celebrate it had a great Thanksgiving.

Harvest Monday - 22 November 2010

Two things made the harvest really good this week. The first is that all the Cherokee Purple tomatoes that I picked ripened. Yay! 5.46lbs of tomatoes were added to the harvest this week. And though I will at some point get around to doing an overview of tomatoes (I hope). I just have to say 43lbs of tomatoes was the final tally for just this one plant. Cherokee Purple was the most prolific tomato I've ever had. It out produced most of the other tomatoes by 2-4 times. I can only hope it produces well in one of our normally cool summers.

The other thing that made it a great harvest week, but a bad gardening week was our first freeze. Well our first two freezes. So I harvested all the lettuce, chard, and spring onions and cleaned up the bed. They won't be doing any more growing anyway.

I also put up a plastic hoop over my row covers on my Asian greens to extend my harvest a bit longer. But I only had enough metal hoops to cover part of them. So the rest of the bed was harvested. Most of it got covered up though. I find at night it keeps it about 5F degrees warmer than outside and during the day it is about 20F degrees warmer. The rock wall leaks cold air into the soil so it will be hard to keep it warm. The most frozen part of the soil was along the rock wall. I would have guessed that the rock wall would be a good heat sink and keep the soil warm, but it doesn't seem to be true. I'll be hoping that I can keep them alive through December with the plastic added, but it probably depends upon how sunny we are.

I spent more money this week. I spent about $100 on hoops for next year. I bought 20 pieces of 18" rebar and two rolls of tubing. I pounded all the rebar into the ground so when it is spring time and I want to defrost the soil, the stakes to hold up the piping will already be up. Two beds have been treated like this. I also spent about $25 on some thick plastic for the Asian green bed. I tried to find a piece of plastic big enough that I already had, but no luck.

• Allium 0.40 lbs
  
• Greens 4.81 lbs
  
• Radishes 0.63 lbs
  
• Tomaotes 5.46 lbs
  
• Spent this week: $123.64
  
• Total harvested this week 11.26 lbs
  
• Total for the year 344.95 lbs
  
• 2010 Tally $877.78
  

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.

Hot! Hot! Hot!

Today I noticed I still hadn't done anything with the hot peppers. I thought about making more pickled peppers, but I wanted to do something different. So instead I made hot sauce. I looked at a recipe for Louisiana Hot Sauce, but it was so boring. Yes I wanted mostly chilies and vinegar, but you have to have at least some garlic and a little bit of sugar helps you deal with the heat.

Daphne's Green Hot Sauce

• 14 green cayenne peppers and 22 serrano pepper (or any kind you've got)
  
• 2 cloves of garlic
  
• 3/4 c vinegar
• t sugar
• t salt
  

Roughly chop the peppers and garlic. Toss everything all into a small saucepan. Boil covered for 10 minutes or until the peppers are soft. BTW I should emphasize that the pan needs to be covered. It really turns the house into a smelly place and a cover helps a lot. You really don't want to choke on hot pepper fumes. Put it into a food processor and process until smooth. Pour into a sterilized jar. I used an old vinegar jar.

You could process this I suppose. But why bother. Anything with this much vinegar will keep forever. I just put mine in the fridge. Though if I had a lot of peppers, I could process it and give it out as gifts. I certainly don't need more than one bottle in a year. Hmm but if you gave it out as gifts you couldn't have it in a tall thin bottle. And hot sauce in a canning jar just isn't right. Do you know of anyone that makes canning jars for things like vinegar or hot sauce?

One drop of this is really hot. It is perfect to spice up anything. If that chili is a bit too mild just a touch of this and instant heat.

And speaking of heat. I opened the windows in the lower part of the house to get rid of that peppers and vinegar smell. I turned the heat off but so far the house hasn't dropped a degree. It is amazingly warm today. It might get up into the mid 60s.

Harvest Monday - 15 November 2010

Fun Jen right, Bok Choy left, Tatsoi and Chinese Broccoli behind

This week saw a basket of the oldies but goodies. Are you getting tired of seeing the same basket of greens every week? I'm not getting tired of eating them yet. I have a ton still in the garden. I still can't eat it all myself though. I always send some over to my townhouse mates. Caroline will come over asking if I have anything to go into soup or spaghetti sauce and I'll say the only things coming out of the garden right now in excess are Asian greens. Please, please take them.

This week was a bit of a change since I also sent over a lot of lettuce and parsley. The rock wall garden was getting hit constantly where the lettuce was planted. I would say about once a month it gets hit. So we put up a couple of posts to keep it from happening. And we got the wall repaired. Which means they had to take it apart and I had to pick all my lettuce from that section. One parsley plant got pulled too, but I still have one left.

And it was clean up week. I took down the beans and got a lot of shelling beans in the process. I've never cooked with scarlet runner beans before. I haven't a clue as to what they taste like either. Also on the list, but no photos were some peppers. The frost didn't really take them down. It killed a lot of leaves, but the lower leaves that were more protected survived. I pulled them all and picked what peppers remained. I forgot to put them into my sidebar tally. I'll fix that next week. But they are in the tally below.

So far the garden is still going strong. We have had only one frost hit the garden. Saturday night I saw frost in the morning on some of the roofs, but not much. It didn't get my garden again. The weather has been so nice that we have been speculating that winter just isn't coming this year. Will this be the first year I bring Asian greens to Thanksgiving? Last year was abnormally warm too and I brought red lettuce, but I didn't have the abundance of Asian greens that I have now.

• Beans 1.52 lbs
  
• Greens 2.99 lbs
  
• Herbs 0.80 lbs
• Peppers 0.36 lbs
  
• Spent this week: $48.00
  
• Total harvested this week 6.76 lbs
  
• Total for the year 333.66 lbs
  
• 2010 Tally $953.62
  

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.

Cleaning Up

Last week should have been fall clean up week. We had a frost. I should have taken down the tomatoes and beans, but I didn't. So yesterday I got myself off my derriere and finally got out and cleaned up the dead beans and zucchini plant.

Now I don't have to look at dead bean plants. Usually I crop the photos so you don't see the neighborhood, but I know some people are shocked when I say I live on a tiny bit of land now. This photo gives you an idea of the neighborhood. There are lots of two family condos in the neighborhood all crammed together. The rock wall garden usually has a car or two parked in front of it. Next year I think I'll put asparagus in here. I love the ferny foliage. So I'm going to call it an ornamental.

When I was cleaning up I ended up with a whole lot of shelling beans. Sadly the scarlet runner beans didn't set until very late in the year. I was worried that I wouldn't get any dried beans from it as seed, but I got a few pods. Enough to seed another year, but no more. I think it was just too hot for them early on. They didn't set until it had cooled down.

In other beany news, I figured my dried beans picked earlier would be dry enough at this point to freeze. Beans tend to have weevil eggs in them, but freezing kills them. So every fall is the great bean freeze. Not to be confused with last weeks bean freeze that killed all my plants. Anyway the hammer is there because beans will die if they are frozen and not dried enough. This wouldn't matter if I were just eating them, but I want some to be seed. They are dry enough when they shatter when hit by a hammer. Now I have bits of bean all over my kitchen. Last year I was smart enough to do this outside.

I'm wondering if I should use the seed saved this year. I swear the runner beans and the cranberry beans crossed. They all look like themselves, but some of the cranberry beans are growing way too big. I swear they are trying to get to runner bean size. If you didn't know runner beans are HUGE. Mine are usually an inch and a half long. But runner beans and cranberry beans are not the same species. So I would think crossing would be uncommon.

Today my chore is to take down the old tomato and pepper plants. It is supposed to be sunny and 60F today so it ought to be a pleasant chore.

Bag Lady Strikes Again

I've learned over the years which weekend is the perfect weekend to start collecting leaves. It is after the leaves are 90% off the trees and right after a weekend with good weather. Everyone will go out and rake that weekend. And in the process leave garden gold (and red and orange) at their curbs to be hauled away. By me.

At my last house there was no trash pick up. So no gold left on the curbs. I had to go one town over to pick up my haul. This year I'm in Arlington with trash pick up right at my curb. Many people don't leave bags, but leave their leaves out in trash bins labeled "Yard Waste". We have weekly yard waste pick up in the fall and you don't even need those wonderful paper bags that I so love. But not to worry. Most people's yards have too many leaves to fit into their single yard waste barrel. Within two blocks of my house there were more leaves in paper bags on the curb Monday than I could possibly use.

My big issue with getting them is that I no longer had my minivan to collect leaves. I could use my husband's car which is a Prius, but you can't even fit the bags in upright. When I got rid of my old minivan I knew it might be an issue. So I gave my car to a friend that lives just a few blocks away. He lent me the car for a few hours. That minivan can fit an enormous amount of bags. And while I had the car I stopped by one of the local hardware stores to pick up two more pallets. Now I have four bins.

And three of them are totally filled with leaves. The other is for the leaves from our yard and the extra leaves in the bags. In the spring the leaves will all have compacted and this bin will be empty to start composting.

You will notice that I need two more small pallets to enclose them. I like the small ones in front because I can reach in if I need to and when I move them they are lighter. They still keep the leaves in well enough. The small pallets are harder to come by. These are from the Ideal Hardware store in Waltham. They use small pallets for their bricks. I didn't even have to collect them. They were from the bricks used to make our walks. I just wish I'd thought to tell them to leave more.

Harvest Monday - 8 November 2010

This week we saw our first frost. This does not mean tomatoes won't be added to the tally.

The Cherokee Purples that I picked green earlier before the first fall frost warning a couple of weeks ago are ripening up nicely. I don't add the green tomatoes to the tally until they ripen. So throughout November I'll be adding in more Cherokee Purples.

Sadly it is the last of the cherry tomatoes. GabrielleAnn (which you can barely see tucked into the corner in the above basket) was a huge producer at 26.84 lbs this year. Wow. This harvest was pretty small though. It is also the last of the peppers and the zucchini. All I can say is that any harvest of zucchini, tomatoes, and peppers is amazing in November around here. This year we have been really blessed by hot weather - and cursed with a lack of rain all summer long.

Fun Jen, Tatsoi, Bok Choy seeds from Mac, Chinese broccoli from Mac

I decided I'd better pick the Asian greens and just try to use them up. Soon the ground will freeze and I won't get any harvests. I picked not quite a quarter of all the greens in the garden. You see here all the Asian greens I've got growing except the green stemmed bok choy. This was the first of the Fun Jen that I picked. It was the longest maturing of the greens I put in. I wasn't sure if it would mature or not, but it finally did. My favorite way to eat this is in salads. I mix it with a bit of lettuce and add some fruit and nuts. I use an Asian style salad dressing of some kind. This time it was a Japanese style dressing. Tasty.

• Alliums 0,19 lbs
  
• Cucurbits 0.14 lbs
  
• Greens 2.99 lbs
  
• Herbs 0.06 lbs
  
• Pepper 0.06 lbs
• Roots 0.51 lbs
  
• Tomato 0.90 lbs
  
• Spent this week: $0
  
• Total harvested this week 4.85 lbs
  
• Total for the year 326.91 lbs
  
• 2010 Tally $969.84
  

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.

First Frost

Well our first frost came last night, November 3rd. I woke up and all the buildings in the area had frost on their roofs. So did my plants. The plants by the fence had just a touch of frost, but the plants at the end without the wooden fence had some pretty heavy frost.

I always love how pretty the frost is.

I guess it is time to take down the tomatoes now.

The marigolds however didn't seem affected by the frost. They are mostly lower and right on the blacktop (better known as a heat sink). They are also more hardy than my tomatoes and peppers.

Get Growing in November

This is the last in a twelve part series for new gardeners. If you have never planted vegetables before but always wanted to, this is the series for you. Robin, who writes the blog Vegetable Matter, was posting through August. Robin lives in Houston and I live in Boston. We will be posting about what to do in the garden that month and giving advice. So if you have always wanted that vegetable garden, but didn’t know where to start, you have no excuse. Get growing!

November in New England brings frozen ground. Even most of the hardy plants will die soon without protection. Some root crops can be harvested if they are well mulched - beets, leeks, carrots, parsnips. Some brassicas could still producing like kale and Brussels sprouts, but not much gardening is going on in this month. Typically the last of the garden is cleaned up and the plants put in the compost bin.

My old garden at the end of November

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

November is a time of reflection for me. The first thing I do is look back on the growing season and take stock of what did well and what did poorly. If you took records throughout the season this part is so much easier. I don't keep a garden journal, but many do and that is a good way of record keeping. My blog is my record of what happened, but I do keep other records. I have a sheet that has all the seed that I'm going to plant and it lists what date I expect to plant. It has a a place fill in for when it was started, how well it germinated, and when it was planted outside. In early spring I'm really good about filling it out. As summer hits I quit. Lets just say record keeping isn't my strong suit. I really try, but sometimes I fail at it. When don't record things, I have to go back to my blog to try to figure out when something was planted.

I ask myself questions like, "Did my carrot crop fail because I planted too early?". "Should I have harvested my garlic later?" "Should I have put my zucchini under a row cover early on to avoid the squash vine borers?" "What were my favorite varieties?" "Was it worth growing Amish Paste again?" Step through each of the crops and take notes for yourself. I do mine on my blog every November. Look to the right panel on my blog and look for my 2009 Overviews. For each set of crops I list the good and the bad from the year. This way I have a place I can go back to and see what happens when I plant carrots in the middle July versus the middle of August. Your notes don't need to be as detailed as mine, but it is good to have all this information to tell you what works and what doesn't where you grow. Next year when you plant carrots, you can go back to your notes and see what worked for you in previous years.

Looking back at your growing season will help you plan next year's garden. Yes we have come full circle to planning your garden again. But this time you have information. Looking back will tell you if you planted too many beets and you need to only plant a three foot row rather than an eight foot row. And if you are like me and read blogs looking back on what you have read will give you an idea for what you will want to plant for next year. I know I want to try celery for the first time next year.

As you plan next year's garden. You should keep in mind one thing that I talked about once before in June. But it bears repeating because it is so important. Rotation. You will often hear that you should rotate your crops. This means that if you planted tomatoes in a spot last year, you shouldn't plant tomatoes in that spot this coming year. Different crops have different rotation schedules based on the diseases they have and how long they last in the garden. Each crop is rotated with the other in its family. These families are plants that are all closely related and tend to have the same needs and diseases and insect pests. The following is a list of the families of the common plants in your garden.

• Amaryllidacaea Family often called the Alliums: leeks, onions, chives, garlic
• Brassicaceae Family often called Brassicas or cole crops: broccoli, cauliflower, mustards, cabbage, rutabaga, kale, collards, cress, radish, rocket, turnips, Asian greens
• Chenopodiaceae Family: beets, Swiss chard, spinach
• Compositae Family: artichokes, sunflowers, lettuce
• Cucurbitaceae Family often called cucurbits: squash, pumpkins, zucchini, gourds, melons
• Gramineae Family: Corn
  
• Leguminosea Family often called legumes: beans, peas, peanuts
• Solanaceae Family often called nightshade crops or solanums: peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, tomatillos, eggplants
• Umbelliferae Family: dill, carrots, coriander or cilantro, fennel, parsnips, parsley, celery

Typically the solanaceae rotation is on a 3-4 year basis. So don't plant tomatoes where ones of the solanaceae family has been in the last few years. The brassicas are typically on a 6-8 year rotation because club root can be very persistent in the soil. The others I worry less about as their diseases aren't as persistent in my garden. In fact I often keep the peas in the same bed with my leafy greens. And then beans come in the next year. So I occasionally have legumes following legumes. But I am adamant about not following a solanaceae with another solanaceae.

Diseases aren't the only reason to rotate crops. Different plants have different nutrient needs also. If you always grow the same crops in the same place. Your soil is more likely to become unbalanced. The typical rotation is to put a heavy feeder (like corn or leafy vegetables) in after a heavy giver (the Legume family puts nitrogen back into the soil), then follow that with a light feeder (like a root crop). Which gives you a three year rotation. This is the typical advice. Which I never follow. My rotations are as follows. Solanum is the first rotation, followed by a mix of brassicas, lettuce, root crops, herbs and peas, followed by a mix of beans, squash, and corn. I put my legumes in with my heavy feeders typically. There is no one right way to do a rotation. Do what works for you.

Since we are busy looking ahead to next season. Now is the perfect time to look ahead to your compost pile. We talked about this last February, but this is the month to collect leaves for you piles. If you live in the suburbs the easiest to find carbon source is leaves. And during this season other people do your work for you. They bag them up and put them right on the curb for you to collect. You might have enough leaves already that fall in your own yard, but if you don't, your neighbors can supply that need. I collect enough for a whole year of composting in my garden. In fact if you collect more than you need for your compost. You can save the rest in a pile for a couple of years to make leaf mold. This is just the leaves broken down into organic matter. It makes a fabulous and free much if you have enough room in the garden to do it.

Other Posts in the Series

Determining your growing zone and planting peas (Vegetable Matter - December)
Planning a Garden (Daphne's Dandelions - December)
Growing Lettuce (Vegetable Matter - January)
Starting transplants indoors (Daphne's Dandelions - January)
Growing tomatoes (Vegetable Matter - February)
Compost (Daphne's Dandelions - February)
Snap Beans (Vegetable Matter - March)
Peas and Spinach (Daphne's Dandelions - March)
Eggplant (Vegetable Matter - April)
Brassicas (Broccoli, Cabbage, Asian vegetables) (Daphne's Dandelions - April)
Edamame (Vegetable Matter - May)
Tomatoes (Daphne's Dandelions - May)
Lima Beans (Vegetable Matter - June)
Disease Control (Daphne's Dandelions - June)
Chili Peppers (Vegetable Matter - July)
Insect Control (Daphne's Dandelions- July)
Southern Fall Garden (Vegetable Matter - August)
Preserving the Harvest (Daphne's Dandelions - August)
Season Extension (Daphne's Dandelions - September)
Garlic (Daphne's Dandelions - October)

Harvest Monday - 1 November 2010

Harvests are getting smaller as it gets colder and colder. We had a frost predicted for last night that didn't come to pass here. Even the basil is still alive. It isn't really edible. There are so many little black spots on it, but it is the most cold sensitive plant in the garden. I'm just shocked. I don't think in my decades of gardening in eastern Massachusetts that I've ever had a tomato plant alive and producing still in November. I know it is because of the dry summer we had. It kept all those fungal diseases at bay for a long time. But it is also because we haven't seen freezing yet. The next two nights will be interesting. We have some good lows projected for the Boston area. Will we get frost?

I've only been harvesting as I want to eat things. Which means I don't pick much and often photos don't get taken. What I ought to start doing is picking a quarter of the remaining plants in the next four weeks. That way they would have a better chance of getting used up before some really good freezes take them down.

I harvested some bok choy and tatsoi this week. It is very, very tasty. Maybe bringing more inside will get me to eat more of it. I have a weird lazy streak in me that doesn't have an issue with hauling tons of dirt all over the yard, but keeps me from going outside and picking at the last minute. That is why I usually harvest by picking a lot during one day and then using it up over time. I should get back into that as the harvests won't last long.

I also harvested two tiny little zucchini. The week before last was so cold I didn't get any, but last week warmed up a bit.

The GabrielleAnn put out a bit more than last week too. And I found a few more green tomatoes to pick and hope to ripen on the counter. If just half of my picked Cherokee Purples ripen I'll be happy. Heck if a quarter of them ripen I'll be happy.

• Alliums 0,38 lbs
• Cucurbits 0.38
  
• Greens 0.88 lbs
• Herbs 0.09
  
• Pepper 0.02 lbs
  
• Tomato 1.29 lbs
  
• Spent this week: $0
  
• Total harvested this week 3.03 lbs
  
• Total for the year 322.06 lbs
  
• 2010 Tally $948.14
  

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.

Random Roundup

At least I've been earning my apple cake this week and yesterday I did penance for it. I finally finished up the beds and getting all that dirt moved. Three hours of heavy labor. And then I went to dance class in the evening. Weirdly I'm not even sore today. I think my body is finally back into working shape. I'm guessing you all want to see the finished product.

You can see it all from my front porch.

The overhead view from the second floor is a weird perspective and you can't even see one of the beds.

This is looking straight down from the same window so you can see the last bed. Yeah OK it looks just the same as all the others, but imagine a white fence along the driveway to the right with an arbor over the path. There will be a 2' strip of herbs and mostly flowers for the bees all along the fence. The fence is supposed to be put in next week. I'm hoping.

Someone (I think Toni) was asking the other day if the paths were wide enough to work in. They are very tight. They are only 19" across. Which is wide enough to bring in my wheelbarrow and set it down. Just. Barely. If I had gotten rid of one of the beds I could have had a good two feet between. A lot of people go for wide paths. I went back and forth in my mind so often. But I figured if I'm going to weed something it is going to be the bed and not the path. I'll mulch the paths, but I'll still be weeding. It will be a veritable jungle in there during growing season. I'll have to be vicious about keeping the foliage out of the paths.

---

I finally pickled my jalapenos and serranos. If I get any more from the garden before the first frost I can just toss them into the jars. These are refrigerator pickles and not canned. They will be used up long before they go bad.

---

The last time I was canning - hmm OK EVERYTIME I can I wish I had an apron as I get splattered with red sauce. I had plenty of cloth hidden away and I decided to start making one. This one is partly finished. I really ought to use a pattern as then I know it will come out right the first time. I kept changing how things were getting done after cutting the fabric. But I wanted a cutesy apron with frills and those don't usually cover enough. I wanted the skirt to wrap around a bit. The top part hasn't been added yet. Eventually I'll get it done. Maybe. I really hate sewing. I'd rather be digging in the garden.

I picked a reddish color so it won't show my tomato splatters as much. Maybe I should have picked off white. Then I could wear it when I bake. I get flour all over the place.

---

Last week I put some GabrielleAnn seeds on the top of the fridge to ferment. I forgot about them. This is the norm for me and tomato seeds. But I usually don't forget too long. I'm allergic to mold and when the sneezing starts, I know I'd better deal with my seeds. There was some pretty gross mold growing on top, but luckily the seeds hadn't dried out yet. So I washed off the seeds to dry. I'm thinking next year I ought to grow the F4 seeds and a real sungold and see how far apart they are in taste and habit. I could get fancy and back cross them. I've never done that before. Then again I could just let nature takes its course.

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Today is garlic day. I soaked the seed garlic last night. I had just gotten into bed when I remembered I hadn't done it yet. Whoops. Back downstairs to take apart my cloves. I'm planting some unknown softneck which I really ought to name because "unknown" just doesn't do it justice. And some German Extra Hardy. I love German Extra Hardy, but the issue with planting it is that it only has four cloves on each head. Four really huge cloves. So to get the same amount as last year I have to plant a quarter of my garlic. This year I'm dumping the Bogatyr so I need to fill in with more German XH. This means I won't get to eat much of it this year. Sad, but I think making more is the best choice. Those cloves had better all make it through the winter. Having only four cloves is really a negative when it comes to planting time.

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And at least last night I ate a little bit better. I had a mix of white and brown rice in the freezer. So I defrosted it and added the fish I had bought on Wednesday to make a nice fried rice. The green is a head of my green stemmed bok choy. So at least I got my veggies yesterday. I love fried rice. Simple fast and so easy. Well as long as there is left over rice in the house.

Some Days I'm Good

And then there are the other days.

My husband has been gone on business trips a lot. I really hate when he goes. But I was good on Monday and Tuesday. He left and I ate well. I was going to make myself a nice Pasta Foozle (maybe better known as Pasta y Fagioli). Or pasta and beans.

The recipe starts off easily. You make a miropoix or since it is an Italian dish I suppose I ought to call it a soffritto. Which is just a fancy way of saying saute some diced onions, celery, and carrots. Then add the beans that have been soaked. I used my Ottawa Cranberry beans that I showed you on Harvest Monday. Add some broth and seasonings (I chose oregano and a bay leaf) and simmer until the beans are done. After add some diced tomatoes or tomato sauce. Or in my case both since I had some nice Cherokee Purples ripe on the counter that really needed to be used up but not quite enough. Throw in a little pasta and you are done. But somehow as the beans were cooking I thought that some hot Italian sausage from the farmers market would taste really good in it. So I tossed that in. I added just one link. But it really turned the soup into a very spicy dish. Regular pasta seemed a bit bland at that point. So I added tortellini. That was good but it needed something else. So I added some Greek yogurt at the end to add a creamy flavor.

Oh it was so good. And good for me too.

Then came Wednesday. My husband was home. I was thinking some fish from the farmers market. But then he called an said he was stuck in a meeting late that day and today too. It made me sad. So I made something else for dinner.

Yes this is an upside down caramel apple cake. I usually make it with a strudel topping, but caramel seemed so much more apropos for a day that I'm going to be bad. So caramel it was. I had two slices for dinner (yes as my dinner, not dessert) with some really good sharp Vermont cheddar. At least I make my cake with some whole wheat flour and it used a lot of apples - apple butter and grated apples in the batter, and the yummy sliced caramelized ones on top. OK so it also had half a cup of butter and a cup of brown sugar in that recipe but whose counts calories when your husband deserts you*.

And since I just know I'll get asked what the recipe is I'll give it to you.

Daphne's Caramel Apple Upside Down Cake

Preheat the oven to 375F.

• 1/4c butter
• 1/2c brown sugar
• 2 apples peeled and sliced

Put the butter and brown sugar in an ovenproof 10" frypan over medium heat. Start slicing up the apples. When they are sliced, cover the pan evenly with the slices. Then start mixing up the batter. Keep cooking the apples while you do this.

• 1/2c flour
• 1/2c whole wheat flour
• t baking powder
• 1/2 t baking powder
• 1/2 t salt
• t cinnamon
  
• 1/4 t nutmeg
• 1/2c applebutter (but you can sub applesauce)
  
• 1/2c brown sugar
• 1/2 t vanilla
• 1 egg
• 1/4c melted butter
• 3/4c grated apple
  

Mix the dry stuff together(except the sugar) and the wet stuff together (plus the sugar), then mix the both of them together. Take the fry pan off the heat and spread the batter over the top. Put in the oven for 20-25 minutes. Once it is done let it sit for about five minutes and then invert it onto a plate. Then if you are like me fix the apples that fell off during this process.

Then cut and put onto a plate and eat with Cabot cheddar cheese for dinner. Err. OK you can have it for dessert if you want. But really don't you want to eat it for dinner too? Especially if you are all alone and no one can see you?

*puns are always intended

Harvest Monday -25 October 2010

Ottawa Cranberry, Trail of Tears, and Kidney

This week I finally got around to shelling my dried beans. I'd been collecting them for weeks and they were sitting on my counter. I decided I needed to reclaim the space. Dried beans take up a lot less room once shelled. Plus they are prettier. The pole beans didn't have any issues with rot, but the kidney beans were dragging their pods on the ground. I found quite a few pods that had to be tossed as they had molded up. I like pole beans better than bush beans, if just for ease of picking, but there are so many varieties that only come in bush. If I grow bush dried beans again, I'll have to remember to pick more frequently.

I picked some Asian greens, but only the ones that had to be picked. The Chinese broccoli (also known as Chinese kale, or Kai lan or Gai lan), was done up in a stirfry. We had a take out dinner at my house with friends. None of us ate the duck sauce that came with our meal so I mixed that with some of my homemade terriyaki sauce and it was quite yummy. But no my friends didn't get to eat my greens as those gatherings are just take out. However I did score some takeout containers. I love the white plastic ones they give out. In the spring they will become flea beetle traps. Flea beetles love the color white (and yellow, but the bees love yellow too so that is bad to use). I fill them with soapy water and place the traps near the tomatoes or the Asian greens and the flea beetles suicide right into them. It doesn't get rid of all of them, but enough to keep them from doing real damage.

I also used up the last of the tomatoes that I had picked green a while back. There weren't many, but the ones that were left got put into the tally. But then I replaced them. There were some frost warnings for Thursday and Friday nights. It turns out we didn't get a frost. I seem to have just as nice of a non-frosting place as my last house. It could be the huge fence surrounding the property. It could keep the cold air from flowing onto our property. And our property has a lot of pavement and bricks which hold in the heat. But because of the frost warnings I picked all the sizable Cherokee Purple tomatoes and any GabrielleAnn that was starting to show a decent amount of color. The Gabrielles were weighed, but the green tomatoes were not. They will once they turn. I also picked all the peppers of any size. Including those two green peppers that wouldn't turn red. If you look at them you might notice that tiny bit of a red blush, but they have been like that forever.

It was a good week for putting up food too. I put up nine pints of applesauce and 2 pints, four cups and one half cup of thicker tomato sauce (good for making into spaghetti sauce later on). Though DH and I can eat a jar of applesauce at a meal, the tomato sauce is sometimes used in smaller quantities so I love to have different sized cans. This time I made sure I had exactly 7 jars so they would fill up my canner, but not go over.

• Alliums 0,14 lbs
• Dried Beans 1.39
  
• Greens 1.01 lbs
• Pepper 0.59 lbs
  
• Tomato 2.21 lbs
  
• Spent this week: $0
  
• Total harvested this week 5.34 lbs
  
• Total for the year 319.03 lbs
  
• 2010 Tally $934.89
  

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.

Changing Seasons

I've been busy since Monday. Tuesday I canned the last of the ripe tomatoes. The green tomatoes that I stripped off about a month ago were either ripe or ready to get tossed. I'd slowly been collecting the remaining tomatoes in the freezer. This was my last canning session of the year. I could use a few more jars of applesauce, but I don't think I'm making anymore. Canning season is over. And just when it starts getting colder and I could use the heat in the house.

My meals have been changing too. Above is what I liked eating during the summer. I have a really nice toaster oven that bakes very well. It puts out very little heat so it works great for baked goods during the summer.

Those tomatoes I use are fast disappearing. A frost was predicted for last night (never materialized) and tonight. So I picked off all the tomatoes from the Cherokee Purple plant. And any that were starting to turn from the cherry tomato plant. I'll have very few fresh tomato pizzas anymore. In addition the basil is turning a horrible brown color so no more basil either. Goodbye summer food.

Now I want something to warm myself during the day. Lunches have been soups all week long. I've been very sad not to have Chinese cabbage this fall. One of my favorite soups is Chinese cabbage soup. Tis the season to be eating it, but with the lack of a planting space in July or early August, it just never happened. My garden was just too small this year. So I only planted the fast maturing Asian greens.

Yesterday I was checking out the greens patch and had to harvest more Chinese broccoli, but I also had a couple of heads of bok choy that were bolting. They are still quite edible at this stage. I even like the stem which was very thick on these. I peel the stem and the inner part is very tender. I was thinking a stir fry was in order, then I remembered my soup. I figured that bok choy isn't all that far from Chinese cabbage - at least the stems aren't. So I made bok choy soup instead.

It wasn't as good as my regular version, but it wasn't bad at all. I like the texture of the Chinese cabbage better as it holds up to cooking more than the greens do, but it was very tasty.

A Day in the Slow Life

Slow life. Hmmm. Sometimes it doesn't seem very slow when I'm multitasking trying to get several things done at once. But then I go outside and talk to my two remaining bell peppers.

Me: So do you think you could turn red right about now?
Peppers: Don't rush us. There is still plenty of time. See we have a tiny blush on us. We think it looks pretty that way.
Me: You have been green for months now surely it is time to turn red. (I get a very hungry look in my eye.)
Peppers: (Looking worried.) No its not time yet. We just want to sit here and soak up the sun for a few more months. We like green. Green is good. Please don't eat us.

The reality is that I never considered myself part of the slow movement. I never really consider myself part of any movement. Movements tell you what to do. I'm not very good at listening to what others think I ought to be doing. I'd much rather do what I want to. But the reality is that at times it follows the movement pretty well. At times not.

When The Mom at Heather's Homemaking invited me to participate I told her I thought about playing devil's advocate. I'd give her Saturday with me not feeling up to snuff and eating all the wrong food, watching TV or playing computer games most of the day. But no I would be kind. Instead I picked Monday, one of my favorite days. If you don't like your Mondays, maybe you will like mine instead.

Monday October 18th

Last Monday I had to work the store (an artists' cooperative), but this Monday I was free. It was all mine. I woke up at 6:30 which is fairly typical for me. I never set an alarm clock. I just wake up at this time. Well truth be told, my husband accidentally woke me up at 5:15 or so first when he got up, but I went back to to sleep.

6:45 Bleary eyed I went downstairs and logged onto the computer. You would think from my blog that I would be writing my post right away, but nope. I logged onto Runes of Magic, a computer game. I play with my husband, but we also have characters to play with my son and daughter. When they both have free time on the weekend we play together. But this morning it was just me. I make the money in the game for the rest of the family. The amusing part is that I do it by planting and harvesting. Yes I play a hack and slash fantasy game and yet still I plant. I only had to water the plants then, so I did, and logged off.

7:00 Time to write my Harvest Monday post. I try to get it up by 8am EST everyday so people can start linking. First I get the sheet where I enter all the harvests from the last week. I punch them into Excel. Then update my side bar tally. Then I upload the photos and process them in Lightroom. I have it set so it automatically sizes the for me when I save. It makes it really fast. Then I write the post.

Ingredients

8:00 Time for breakfast. The typical breakfast that I eat everyday is eggs and cereal. Usually my eggs are from the Golden Egg Farm at this time of year - free ranged and good, but I forgot to get them last week when I was stocking up on apples for sauce and meat for the winter. So these are store bought eggs. Which is unusual in the summer and fall, but pretty normal for the winter and spring when we have no farmers market to shop at. The vegetables are from my garden except the onion. I was too lazy to go out and pick one of my bunching onions so store bought it is. The jar is my pickled jalapenos and serranos. I love to spice up the eggs. The cereal is a weird mix of two kinds of flakes. One organic multigrained cereal and one non organic oat flake cereal that makes it taste good. I'm lactose intolerant so I drink soy milk with this. I grew up hating milk anyway. And soy milk I love. I buy Trader Joe's Organic plain soy milk. I really don't comprehend the love of sweetened vanilla flavored soy milk.

As the onions are cooking I clean the kitchen as I do everyday that I cook eggs for breakfast. I can pretty much get it looking nice in the time it takes everything to saute and cook. Though occasionally I have too much to clean and I end up with cold eggs. I'm weird about my dishrags that I clean up with too. I like them small, but I'm too lazy to sew up the edges, so there you have it. Dish rags coming apart at the edges.

Another thing that you don't usually see in kitchens is my plastic jar of egg shells. When I make eggs the shells don't get thrown out. Or even into the compost. They go into their own little container to get dried out in the oven and powdered. It makes wonderful fertilizer for tomatoes. I never plant without it.

8:45 Monday is laundry day. And if you are me or my son as soon as you hear the word "laundry day", you start singing "Laundry day. See you there. Underthings tumbling..." And if you can tell me where that song comes from you are a person after my own heart. Each day of the week has its own chore. Tuesday is the master bath; Wednesday is dusting; Thursday guest bath; Friday sweep and mop if needed. Unlike a lot of people, I don't really mind cleaning the house as long as I don't have to do hours in a day. And breaking it up means that I rarely have to do more than half an hour in a day. You might notice that the kitchen isn't in the list at all. That is because it has to be done just about every day.

I usually have four loads of laundry to do each Monday - darks, lights, towels, sheets. I've made my own laundry detergent but I really don't get the charm of it all and might go back to store bought. I started because no one as selling powdered detergent and I hate the liquid stuff.

9:00 I'm canning applesauce today. The first chore is to clean the stove. It gets hot with lots of pots on high and anything on the stove will burn to it. I'd rather start clean and then clean it up again after. Then I clean the sink with Bon Ami. All the other cleaning was done with a wet dish rag and no cleaner at all, though I do use a 50/50 solution of water and vinegar some days. I have asthma and am not a fan of cleaners with chlorine or ammonia.

After the kitchen is clean, I wash and cut up the apples. I use two pots to boil them down. They could fit into one pot but they are so much easier to stir in two. Plus they cook faster. I don't peel or core the apples. I toss them in quartered.

9:45 The apples are all chopped and bubbling away. I'll let them boil down for about an hour or so. While I'm occasionally stirring I start to think about making soup. I picked some radishes the other day and their tops looked wonderful. So radish top soup is on the menu. I just know you will ask what is in it so here goes:

• 1/3 Vidalia onion
• 3T butter ( I never said it was healthy)
• 3 small yellow onions
• 4c chicken broth
• radish tops lots they filled my colander
• 1/2c cream optional
  

I debated back and forth with myself about the cream part. I love it with cream, but I didn't have any in the house. So I turned off the stove and got my shoes on. The nice thing about my new neighborhood is that you can walk to things. We have a little Greek corner store about 6 or 7 blocks away. It is a tiny tiny shop but carries a lot of nice vegetables and typical items you would need on short notice. In addition it has half the store devoted to things whose labels I can't read or things like sesame seeds in large plastic bags. It is a fun little store. So I got my cream there and was back in 15 minutes from when I left.

10:00 Switched the laundry, started the dishwasher (how I get my canning jars hot). It was here that life got hard. The radish top soup that I make is blended to make it smooth. It doesn't look like radish leaves. It looks like green liquid. I've made radish top soup often enough before in my old blender. Now I have a new one. I brought it out and put in half the soup which filled it up half way. I turned it on and it pushed the lid off and I had chicken broth all over the counter. Sadly the toaster and the small food processor were nearby so it was all over them. I have a line of bottles, red wine, olive oil, sunflower oil, Pam. It was all over them. It was a greasy disgusting mess. I looked at it and told the blender how bad it was. So I got my big food processor down and put half the soup in that. My food processor doesn't have a very sharp blade any more. Too many eggshells have been crushed in it. But it was enough to get the leaves chopped into bits. Then could pour that into the blender to turn it into a liquid. It was annoying but it worked. Then it was back onto the stove. I looked at the counter and started to clean, giving my blender bad looks the whole time.

11:00 The kitchen is clean again. I put the canner onto the stove filled with water. In addition I put on a small pot for the lids. Then I strain the apples into applesauce. I like using the whole apple because I get the core too. The core has a lot of the pectin so the applesauce is thicker. Once it is strained I put it back on the stove and do a taste test. This batch gets one cup of sugar (for about 15 lbs of apples) and some cinnamon. I stir it all in. As soon as the canner starts to boil I start canning. It took two sessions to finish. My canner takes seven pint jars and I ended up with nine.

I'm not just sitting around while I'm waiting the 15 minutes for the cans to come out. Though I love my dishwasher and filled it up easily enough. I still had a lot of things that needed hand washing. I always hand wash my Victorio strainer. Plus all the bigger pots and bowls I use. It is amazing how many things needed cleaning. It didn't help that both my food processors and my blender were dirty. They could fill up the top of the dishwasher with just them.

12:24 The last of the jars get removed from the water bath. The counters get a last wash down. The only pot not washed is the canning pot. I left the water in it to cool down. With the heat on I figure pouring hot water down the drain is a waste. It can get cool on the counter then I'll toss it. The bits and pieces of the vegetables and fruit were taken out to the compost pile. I wash my hands.

12:30 A long morning, but I'm still not hungry. I'm tired and hot. I need to rest a bit before I'm hungry. First I switch the laundry. Then I sit down and respond to some of my blog comments. A little after one and I'm finally hungry. I heat up the soup (which was put in the fridge). I add some cream and some greek yogurt to it. And sit down and have a nice bowl of soup. Of course one bowl of soup is just not filling enough. I want some bread and cheese. Usually I have bread dough in the fridge and can fry some up in my cast iron fry pan fast enough, but I was out. So I brought out the mixer and got a batch of dough made. Sadly frying up dough that hasn't risen is not quite the same, but I'm calling it flatbread. I covered it in some raspberry jalapeno jelly that I canned last year and then added some nice cheddar cheese.

Actually Tuesday's lunch as I forgot the photo on Monday

I sat down at the TV to eat it all. I usually eat breakfast and lunch at the TV. I like to watch the "news". Which means the Daily Show or the Colbert Report. What can I say? It is much more fun to laugh at the news than to cry.

2:15 Switched the laundry.

That bed won't fill itself

2: 30 Got changed to go outside. I've been working to get my new garden up and running. After the move I just had a little rock wall garden and I wanted a big garden. Bigger than my old one. In fact this one will be over twice as large as my old garden. Next spring I'll be saying to myself, "What in the world was I thinking?" But for now I'm finishing up the last of the beds. I couldn't get wood for the last bed. Home Depot had run out. But I had all eight of the others built and made. I had seven of them mostly filled with the dirt. Some need a bit more, but mostly done. I just needed to finish filling up the eighth bed today. Ok I did a bit more. I filled up some of the other beds a bit more. I leveled off one area at the end that will be an herb/flower garden. I measured out where the last bed will go.

Finished for the day

4: 15 Shower. Then read blogs. I probably switched the laundry again. But who knows when. It isn't on my paper anywhere.

4:45 I start thinking about what we should have for dinner. Chestnut Hill Farms was selling some smoked chicken breasts and I wanted to try them out. If we like them, I can stock up on more before winter hits. So I made chicken, hmm lets call it focaccia even if it isn't, and some salad for dinner. Yes the bread is the same that I had for lunch and will have all this coming week when I want bread. This time I brushed it with olive oil and put on some herbs and freshly grated Parmesan cheese then I baked it in the oven. The salad was made with things just from the garden. The dressing was made by my townhouse mate from basil and parsley from the garden. She made it last week and I've been slowly eating it up. I only have one salad left with it.

6:00 Dinner time. I think. Maybe. I quit writing down the times. We often have dinner at 5:30, but I think he was late.

6:30 Exhausted. Tired. My feet hurt (though I'd have to give you Sunday to really show you why). I was just dead tired. I got myself a glass of scotch. Yes, I'm a scotch gal when I'm being bad. I drink wine when I'm being good. But right now I'm being bad. I went into the cabinet where I put the Halloween candy. I took out two little Snickers bars and ate them. Scarf. Mmmm. Yum. Yum. Don't look at me like that. They really hit the spot. Spiked my blood sugar. Raised my insulin levels.... Well at least they were yummy.

I thought about reading blogs. I hadn't read much of the Harvest Monday blog posts yet. I also thought about all the other things I didn't get done today. I hadn't done my Spanish homework. I hadn't made the pickled peppers out of the pepper harvest I just had. Maybe tomorrow I'll have time for it all. So I put my feet up in my reclining chair and turned on the TV. I watched things off tivo for an hour and a half. Until 8pm. Then hubby and I went upstairs to read. Since this is a PG blog, I'll leave it at that. But maybe I wasn't as tired as I thought. Or maybe it was the Snickers bar.