Spring Planting

I have this habit of taking pictures of every new veggie sprout and every planting of every veggie....every year. Matt has been making fun of me for this. This year I found myself standing in front of the newly sprouted asparagus bed with my camera in my hand and I had the following conversation with myself in my head:

Repeat after me: you don't need to take pictures of the first asparagus every year.

I don't need to take pictures of the first asparagus every year.

People by now know what they look like. Every year.

People by now know what they look like. Every year.

These aren't the droids you're looking for.

These aren't the droids we're looking for.

Move along.

Move along....Move along!!!

So. Now that I have that out of the way, I can tell you that this weekend I planted kohlrabi (for the first time, too), broccoli plants, and leeks. I also rehabbed two tomato beds that I didn't get to last fall, and I tried to fix the pea beds. Too wet, a lot of them became slug food/homes and some others rotted. I have enough seed to reseed if necessary. Oh, and the asparagus is coming up.

Tomorrow I plan on planting some flowers and such in the new flower bed. I hope to get the potatoes in this week as well as the carrots/radishes.

Matt finished up the rafters in the garage on Sunday, I will have pictures of that soon.

And...it is supposed to be 90* tomorrow. Ick.

Having a Heat Wave

So, now we're back to 75*. Supposedly going to be 85* on Saturday.

I go from too cold to plant spring veggies to too warm in one week. I'm going to plant them anyway, probably this weekend.

In other news (pictures forthcoming), asparagus is starting to come up, cabbages and broccoli that overwintered seem to be doing well, and peas are planted.

Late Fall Harvest

For a garden blog I haven't been talking much about the garden, have I? Here is a bit about what is going on:

This is the broccoli on November 15:
I had 13 broccoli plants this year (14 originally, one didn't make it). I bought them at Lowes in Lexington, VA, because my local greenhouse was sold out by the time I got to them. I really wasn't sure I was going to get broccoli this year because by the middle of October they were but wee little broccoli wannabes. When I picked the first batch at the beginning of December they were huge:I got a great Fall broccoli crop! A little wormy, but I took care of them (for the most part. I hope). You can see the size here, my gloved hand is at the left: A week after I picked the first snow-covered batch we were having a cold and windy spell and I decided to pick the rest before the wind got to it. It has all been blanched and frozen now.

I also cut into the single Australian Butter squash I got, and 'Butter' is the perfect word to describe the flavor. Fantastic! I will grow these again:

1/3 of this squash went into this apple and cranberry dish for Thanksgiving:The remaining 2/3 was cooked (too much, I think) and frozen. This is a great squash.

My remaining carrots and parsnips are still in the ground. I covered them over with the now-infamous bags of leaves to try to insulate them some. Next warmish spell I'll try to dig them up. The cabbages, I fear, are toast. Just got them in too late.

MIA

Sorry I've been a bit MIA. Busy, tired. Sick recently (stomach thing, ick). Posts on garage work, broccoli, and the jewelry class I took coming either here or on GemlikeFlame. Stay tuned!

Fall Veggie Update

I was about to post about pouring concrete when I remembered that a) this started out as a garden blog, and b) I haven't posted about gardening in a loooong time, so I'm doing that today.

Onions: I harvested our 2009 onions already and they are in the basement, but on the suggestion of a friend I seeded onion directly into a bed this past August to overwinter. This was a French variety I'd really wanted to try more of, and I'm really excited to see how it works out. So far, so good, as they are coming up and look healthy and sturdy:
Garlic/Shallots: I planted these this past weekend. 35 French gray shallots, 3 red shallots, and I'm not sure how much garlic yet (I haven't tallied them up). Planted Transylvanian, Chinese Pink, Music, Applegate, and Shantung Purple.

Broccoli: I have two varieties of broccoli in, too: this fall crop and a purple sprouting broccoli for next spring. This year's batch is almost ready to pick.

Cabbages: I may have put these in too late, I'm not sure. I've never grown cabbage before.

Turnips: I planted a lot of turnips, ONE grew. It is currently in the refrigerator waiting to be cooked.

Carrots: These did beautifully in my second batch. I've picked a lot, but there is a lot still in there. I'm going to wait until after the first real freeze to pull them.

Parsnips: Still in the ground, I have no idea what's going on down there.

Peanuts: I got about 8 dozen peanuts!! Off four plants!! I'm pretty happy with that, and they are good size, so I think I will grow them again.

Weekly Update 5 13 2009

No pictures, just words this time.

The re-tagging project is finished.

I took a half day Wednesday so I could work on the last of the new beds: got two beds done and planted nine peppers and three tomatoes. Four beds to go. I’m down to 16 tomatoes and only four peppers that need homes.

And the squash. Melons. Okra. Oh, and the sweet potato slips that haven’t even arrived yet. Sweet potatoes are going on a terrace, nine tomatoes are going in hangers, so I THINK we’ll have enough space. I think. Fingers crossed.

Broccoli has broccled, but it looks weird so I don’t know if a cold or heat wave has gotten to it or not. Lettuce (heading) is doing beautifully, some were large enough that I had to replace the milk jug cloches with row cover.

The only things I’ve been harvesting is asparagus and spinach. I picked from the new asparagus bed for 2 weeks this year because they were so huge. I’m letting them branch out now, though. Spinach I’ve been picking at a bit, the babies are growing very quickly so I hope to have an actual meal from them this week.

The wee itty bitty fringy carrot and parsnip leaves are finally making an appearance. I see little baby leaf lettuces coming up, and the radishes are growing fast.

Peanuts are planted, and I went to look at them yesterday and it looked like someone had bitten them off. I took a closer look. No, there is new growth at the top, and the ‘branches’ have taken a nose-dive for the ground, which is what threw me. It just looked so strange as most things reach for the sun. Peanut branches dive. And YES, I DO KNOW that peanuts grow underground. I have known this since I was a child, as my father is from Atlanta. My husband felt the need to explain this to me yesterday, though, which earned him a wifely glare. Ahem.

In two weeks we are going to Virginia to visit a friend, and the three of us are going to be visiting Edible Landscapes, a nursery that specializes in, you guessed it, trees and bushes that produce food. We are going to pick up a few things, we are thinking about a couple Hazelnuts (aka Filberts; you need two to pollinate) and possibly one of the varieties of Trifoliate Orange, which is hardy in our area {insert shock and awe}.

In other news, I have dug and separated the saffron crocus. I planted 8 a couple years ago, and I must have dug 10 times that many. Several friends and coworkers have received some and I had plenty to put about 10 different places around the house.

And finally, there may be a guest post by the Garden Ninja sometime. Possibly. Not sure, but worth mentioning.

Monthly Update 9/21/08

Again, not keeping up with this as much as I’d like. I somewhat got derailed when Max had his medical emergency and never got back on track (most recent Max update on my other blog). It wasn’t just this, though, I got off track with the garden, too. I’m going to be playing catch up here over the next couple weeks with a bunch of my infamous So, what do you do with….? series, and I will do a couple bits on flowering things from the summer.

Tomatoes are starting to wind down. There are still a LOT of fruits on the vines, but they are taking a long time to ripen. Same with the peppers.

Cucumbers are done, as are the beans. Not at all thrilled with the beans I grew this year. The Roc d’Or yellow beans were terrible, did not like them at all. And they were spotty and bug-chewed very badly, so I pulled the plants and I’m going to burn them (as opposed to putting them in the compost bin, since they’re diseased or something). The Kentucky Wonder pole beans were very tasty raw, but cooked they were mushy and tasteless. I may grow some next year, but only for eating raw. Otherwise, I’m in the market for a couple new varieties of beans.

I started some fall crops, I have broccoli in and just planted some spinach seedlings. I planted some fall radishes that are pink on the inside, white skins. They’re called watermelon radishes. I also put in some more beets, but I may not get any out before it turns really cold.

The parsnips are still in the ground, I did pull the 5 smallest ones to see how they’re doing. They were very nice, smelled wonderful. I hope to get a good batch out, and will probably grow them again next year.

I have 2 orange pumpkins and one winter squash of the Triamble variety.

Now is the time to be planting garlic, but we aren’t quite yet. No place at the moment. I may put them where the beans were this year and between the broccoli. We’ll see.

Weekly Veggie Patch Update 6/23/08

I have off all week, so I'm hoping to catch up with some of the things that are going on. We had a LOT of work done around the property on Saturday and I'll be posting pictures, you won't want to miss it.

Active week, we put up the tomato cage structures. They were heavy wire and a little big so we trimmed them. I do have little cherry tomatoes and another on the Mortgage Lifter plant. No peppers yet, but they’re getting ready to flower.

Matt started working on the fencing around the blueberry bush (what will eventually be the blueberry patch). All we needed to do is put a net over the bush to keep the birds out. He makes a split-rail fence. *sigh* Over-engineer much? Ya think?

I also got the layering cups on the blueberry bush, so hopefully in 2-3 months we’ll have 3 little blueberries to plant in our newly fenced plot.

I picked a lot of snap peas this week, maybe 5lb. They will have to be picked about every other day, but they’re not. A lot of what I picked was past prime and we’ll need to shell them, but no big deal as we’ll then have shelled petit pois to freeze as well as pods. Some of the vines must be approaching 7 feet tall! I’m not sure if I should attribute that to all the rain or the very rich lasagna garden I created.

I also harvested the kale and broccoli. The broccoli plants did something strange. I have 4 plants: two produced nice broccoli and the other two buttoned. I don’t know why that happened. I pulled the two that buttoned and put in another cucumber trellis.

The onions are all starting to bulb, some of them are getting pretty big. I’m guesstimating that I’ll be harvesting them the middle to end of July. I’m planning on leaving that bed empty for the rest of the summer, amending it with some compost and/or well-rotted manure stuff and then planting spinach in it for the fall. I’ll probably let the spinach winter over so I don’t have to plant any for the spring.

We also finished the 2nd asparagus bed and planted it. Everything came up in the first bed, so in a few years we’ll have some nice asparagus to harvest. Woo-hoo!

So what do you do with the....broccoli?

Well, we eat it! I don't can stuff (yet) and we didn't really have enough to freeze this year. Again, this was a test crop to see how it would do for me....and the results were mixed.

I originally tried to grow my own seedlings, but after they stayed the same size for weeks I decided to buy 4 seedlings at a local greenhouse and I planted those. I put floating row cover over them while they were small and we had cool weather. I did this to keep them from buttoning. And the strange thing is two of the plants put out regular broccoli, and the other two plants buttoned. I don't know why. (see below)

After they got large enough that they resembled broccoli you would find in the grocery store, I took a good sharp knife and cut them. I've heard horror stories about worms in the broccoli, so I soaked them in salted water for a few hours (I've heard this gets rid of the worms). No worms came screaming out. I'm going to assume that means there were no worms to be found.

The good news is that I left the two plants that produced the good broccoli and they are already putting out side shoots of edible broccoli, so I will get a second harvest out. I also already bought 8 plants to put in for Fall broccoli.

The next day we decided to have them in our favorite broccoli recipe, which is in The Fat Fallacy book about French cooking. I recommend this book to any American seriously interested in learning about the way Europeans eat. Anyway, it goes like this:

Take as much broccoli as your family will eat at a meal. Steam it until it is the color of good limes. In the meantime, in a large bowl place the juice of at least 1 generous lemon, a couple teaspoons (or more) of butter and a couple tablespoons of good olive oil, salt and pepper to taste. Once the Broccoli is done, place it in the bowl and stir and stir until all the juices and oils are absorbed by the broccoli.

Enjoy!

Weekly Veggie Patch Update 6/16/08

Not much went on this week, I’m back into Waiting Mode. I pulled my first sweet pea early this week, not quite ready to eat but I ate it anyway. I couldn’t help it. More ripened up later in the week. Matt’s dad loves sugar snap peas, so I gave my first real harvest of them to him for Father’s Day, maybe 2 cups worth.

Cukes and melons are getting their second set of leaves, finally. Tomatoes are starting to flower. Peppers are soooo sloooow to get going. Beets are still doing ok, though, they’re starting to get some roundness to the roots.

I pulled the rest of the radishes, they were starting to bolt. Not many carrots germinated this year, I don’t know why but I’ll guess it was the 12” of freakin’ rain we got. Maybe some of the seeds washed? I finished weeding that bed, took about an hour. Got a tiny bit of sunburn on my shoulders.

Broccoli is still doing its thing. It doesn’t appear to have buttoned. Only 2 of the 4 plants are producing actual broccoli. Some broccoli varieties will continue to put little broccolis out after you cut the main crop, but I don’t know if this variety will do it or not.

After I pull the broccoli, bok choy, and the last of the heading lettuce I’m going to replace them with more bush beans. Can’t have too many bush beans. I’ll probably put in another small trellis for cucumbers, too.

The heading lettuce seedlings I started are coming up. Once they’re big enough I’m going to try fit them in where I can in the veggie patch. These varieties are supposed to do ok in hot weather, but I can cover them if I need to.

The squash and pumpkins are doing well, I had to seed a couple more where they'd died. I put some more of the self-watering gizmos up there, too.

I trimmed the scapes off the garlic on Friday and took them to David to sell. Matt and I had been concerned because the few things we’d taken to him before he didn’t pay us for and didn’t mention that he would, so this was the last chance for him, and he did finally pay us. So, that’s a load off our minds.

Weekly Veggie Patch Update 6/9/08

This was a productive week! Finally!

Pulled more Pink Celebration radishes, took some to David who asked if I had more to sell. Uh, sure!!!! They really do look nice. Some of them split due to the additional 1 inch of rain we got on Tuesday, so I kept those for me (my radish needs are not great). I think this is the most rain I’ve ever seen in a spring. Matt ‘n’ I took 5 bunches of radishes to David ‘n’ Junko’s on Saturday morning. It was very odd, it was bright, clear and sunny at our house. 2 miles away we hit a fog bank that continued the whole way into Gettysburg.

The sand I put around the peppers and beans seems to be working, but if one little piece of hay is touching the plant those slugs will find it and use it as a bridge. It’s amazing. I’ll need to plant more beans to make up for some that were devoured. I went up to put out some beer slug traps and found slugs on the onions, for crying out loud. I wound up picking slugs I saw on any plant and throwing them into the beer, cheering as I watched them DIE DIE DIE.

The bok choy got big! I don't know when to pick it. Peas are starting to form….just in time for 98 degree weather which will probably kill them before any kind of harvest can really happen. I pulled all the spinach, stay tuned for another post on that this week. I planted more bush beans where the spinach had been. The broccoli plants each have little broccoli florets on them (they’ve broccled!!), but I can’t tell yet if they are normal or if they have buttoned. Again, not great timing with the heat.

Melons have sprouted, too, I’m keeping them covered with milk jug cloches until I absolutely have to take them off. The pumpkins have sprouted, as have the pole beans. Cucumbers are starting to come up again, we’ll see if something pulls them out. Again. I may have to put cloches over these, too.
In other news, I picked one of the heads of romaine I had growing….and found a 2-inch across mama wolf spider with egg sack in one of the leaves. EEEWWWW. I’m not a big spider fan. I’ve gotten better, there was a time where I would have not eaten the lettuce, I may have thrown the lettuce across the lawn when I saw her. But this time I just gingerly picked the leaf off and laid it on the ground, then did the heebie-jeebie dance. And we did eat it, and it was good.

We also got in another 100+ of potatoes, so we only have another bag and a half to go, thank god. Only a few potato beetles found, one toad, and some of the blues are blooming!

We’re talking about getting a greenhouse, 10x12. If so, I could use that next year for seed starting. Better yet, I could use it for spinach and lettuce and carrots, etc, which would free up extra space for other things in the fenced garden patch. Sweet.

Weekly Veggie Patch Update – 5/12/08

Another 4 inches of rain. Fortunately, most of the seeds I planted are already sprouted and are established, so I’m not too worried about anything rotting. I have melon and squash seedlings chugging along and I plan on putting them in hopefully in about a week.

I’m including a picture this week of my rosemary in bloom. I haven't had good luck with the rosemary in the herb bed so this year I planted it on the sheltered side of the house and it lived through the winter!

I also have pictures of the spinach and the arugula. I think it is arugula, I’m really not sure. Nothing much is coming up in that bed, so I’ll probably be planting the melons in this spot, too.

I’m waiting for some nice weather to plant the cucumbers and pole beans and the tomato and pepper seedlings.

I don’t know if the broccoli is going to broccle this year, I don’t see any florets forming. I’ve never grown broccoli before, so this is a test to see what happens.