Some Things Grow

My little flower patch of sweet peas, red runner beans, sunflowers, chamomile, new raspberry plants and one volunteer pumpkin plant. It is supposed to be my raspberry patch, but since the raspberry plants are new and won't fruit this year, I couldn't resist letting a bunch of pretty things grow too. Next year I promise to keep it clean so the berries can grow. This will really start to bloom in the coming weeks.

This is the same Oregon Spring tomato I showed in my last post. Look how it's grown! This type of tomato seems to grow one or two large tomatoes early, and then the following ones are small and round.
This is one of my Hungarian Wax peppers. It will begin to ripen yellow and will be fully ripe when red. Staying nice and happy up next to the house.

No pictures of the zucchini as they are refusing to grow. Been too cool I suppose. If they were planted up by the house they would be happier, but that is prime real estate saved for the tomatoes and peppers. We are still eating mostly peas and lettuce. I have lots of snap peas that need to get in the freezer today. I should pull out some pea plants soon to make way for my winter kale and brussels sprouts. But it is hard to pull out one of the only plants in the garden that we are eating from. What a strangely cool summer it's been....here anyway! We are having a touch of sun today and I hope the zucchini are taking full advantage of it.

The tri-color bush beans are flowering and I did see a couple of tiny beans today. The purple beans seem to be growing a bit faster than the green or yellow. I am looking forward to cooking up some beans soon!

The strawberries are taking a little break from fruit, but I have seen some new blossoms so we will wait for the next flush. The blueberries are slow like last year, but they are growing. We will just have to be patient.

Irrigation

Hello!

This year I cheated. I bought some tomato starts from Carpinito's nursery. Lucky me, this Oregon Spring tomato is now fruiting! I did attempt to grow these from seed but the first set died from damping off in the seeding tray, and those 3-inch pots at the nursery were very tempting. I up-potted the starts into gallon containers when I got them home and slowly hardened them off until the frigid snap ended.

I begin my experiment in irrigation. We are trying out drip hoses, snaked throughout the garden. Soon, I plan to set up a timer to get the garden watered early in the morning. I hope this new approach to watering will free up more time to relax and play with the kids in the yard. Those white tents you see are frost blankets shielding the cucumber, pepper and tomato plants from the cool winds we have been having.

The peas were looking so beautiful yesterday in full blossom. I expect we will soon have more peas than we can handle. The first set on the left are Wando shelling peas, the second group are snow peas and the third, shorter group on the right (sown about a month after the first two), are snap peas. I am using two fold able, square tomato cages to hold up each group. Yes, they are bush peas, but they are so much neater when they have a bit of structure to hold on to.

The first sign that the Wando shelling peas will soon be ready to eat!

Here, we have two Oregon Spring plants and one Honey Bunch Grape tomato plant settled neatly by the house behind a row of Seascape strawberries. I love this southern spot under the eaves for growing tomatoes. There is even a big bush on the west side that blocks the wind. At night, I have still been covering the tomatoes with a frost blanket just to keep them a bit warmer. I use clothes pins to attach the blanket to the cages,and landscape pins anchor it to the ground. In the morning I just tuck the blanket under the strawberries.

I would like to report that we have had a few large bowls of salad, one topped with a few snow peas. The kids and I have kept the strawberry rows freshly harvested. It's hard to get a truly ripe strawberry as my little helpers don't mind the slightly tart ones and eat them up before they get that super sweet taste that I love.

We have also planted the following:

green zucchini
yellow zucchini
carrots
rainbow swiss chard
bulls blood beets
lemon cucumber
green slicing cucumber
sweet peppers-Hungarian Wax, Italian Sweet
leeks
cilantro
parsley
Genovese basil
dill
chervil
summer savory
shallots
green onions
endive
bush beans-tri-color-mix
scarlet runner beans
Cascade Delight raspberry plants

Stepping Stones and Strawberries

We added 12 stepping stones down the center of the new raised garden. I plan to grow small vegetables such as chard, radishes and carrots between the stones.
I rooted around the old strawberry patch and found some "babies" to transplant into the new garden. There can never be too many strawberries for this family. You can see in the top right that I have made my first attempt for the year at seeding peas around cages. Let's see if it takes. It has been very very wet and also cold lately. High of 51 degrees today.

A welcome addition to the garden is our climbing dome. Its purpose is to keep the children engaged while I try to get some things planted, weeded and harvested. I'm sure the exercise will do them good as well. Once the children are grown, the structure will make a great trellis for peas, cucumbers or squash.

A New Garden is Built

It turns out my original vegetable garden plot was surrounded by creosote soaked railroad ties. So we relocated the vegetable garden to a sunnier spot in the yard and made it a raised bed. The old spot will be used to grow hummingbird-friendly plants.

The first design for the new raised garden didn't seem quite right.

So we tore it down and stacked the bricks three high.

Husband spent a day in near-freezing temperatures finishing the garden walls. The finished size is 8 feet by 23 feet. Then I covered the grass inside with newspapers and lined the walls with black landscape plastic sheeting.

Next, husband spent a night hauling garden soil from the front yard, where we had it delivered, to the backyard raised garden. The best Valentine's gift ever. A new, raised garden. Now it's just going to sit and wait for the worms to come cultivate. I plan to start some peas in March.

The Harvest

Kale harvest on December 1st

We had a record low of 14 degrees (F) on November 24th, 2010. December 1st, I harvested a good bunch of this Dwarf Siberian Kale from the back veggy garden. No, it's not growing under a sheet or plastic. It was insulated by about 6 inches of snow at the time of the record low. They say kale is sweeter after being touched by a light frost. I wasn't sure it would survive such cold, but it did. I used the leaves to make a kale pesto. You know, so the kids would actually eat it.

Here's my "December kale pesto pasta with peas and chicken" recipe:

Ingredients:

Kale, roughly chopped, enough to fill a 2 quart pot
2 Tbsp. dried basil, or 1/4 cup fresh chopped basil
1/2 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic
salt to taste-I like it salty so about 1/2 tsp.
Cooked pasta from 12-16 ounces dry pasta
1 cup warmed peas (from fresh or frozen)
1 pound chopped, cooked (warm) chicken, if desired
fresh ground pepper
extra Parmesan

Directions:

1. Steam chopped kale. I used the steamer pot over my 3 quart sauce pan and steamed the kale for about 15 minutes. I steam the kale because if you don't, it is a gritty pesto sauce.
2. Place steamed kale, basil, Parmesan cheese, salt and garlic in your food processor and pulse. Drizzle olive oil in a few batches and continue to process until it is smooth. Now you have pesto sauce.
3. Put half of the pesto in the fridge or freezer for later. Mix the other half with hot cooked pasta (from a full package of about 12-16 ounces dry-I used a gluten-free quinoa/corn flour macaroni). Add warmed peas and cooked chicken and mix. Add more olive oil if it looks dry. Serve with freshly ground pepper and more Parmesan cheese on top.

The great thing about the macaroni and peas and feeding kids is that the peas get stuck inside the macaroni, so the kids can't pick the peas out. : -)

October 25, 2010 Gypsy and Miniature Bell Peppers

October 25, 2010 Kohlrabi and Spaghetti squash. It was the year of the tiny squash.
Kohlrabi tastes like a cross between broccoli and green cabbage. I peel, slice, and stir-fry.

Sugar Pie Pumpkin and Jack-be-Littles. October 25, 2010

Kale, tomatoes, peppers, Rosemary. October 25, 2010. It was a good day for harvesting. I have lots of 12-ounce bags of chopped tomatoes in the freezer, just waiting to be made into Mexican rice for the coming year. Should be enough cilantro stored away too. That recipe is worth sharing too. Maybe next time!

Gypsy Pepper

Yes, we have some peppers this year! The gypsy peppers are turning from green to orange to red. We had this one last night, sliced into a taco salad. I made the salad with organic romaine lettuce (from the store), my Oregon Spring tomatoes, my Gypsy peppers,my sliced green onions and my cilantro. I finished off the salad with re-fried pinto beans, tortilla chips, organic non-fat plain yogurt, Mexican shredded cheese blend, Pace picante sauce and a bit of hot taco sauce. It was a great dinner, and so fun to see that so much of it was from my garden.

More great news is that there are six healthy Gypsy pepper plants outside and more are beginning to ripen up. I'm hoping to have a bunch to freeze. I might have to pick some still green if a frost gets into the forecast, but we will see how many red ones we can get before then.

In tomato news, I have baskets of Honey Bunch grape tomatoes on the counter along with a few Oregon Spring tomatoes. The Roma VF's are being really slow to ripen and the plants don't look very well, but we will take what we get.

The kids still get a strawberry or two each day and have even started "grazing" on the green onions...hmmm. I get a handful of green beans every few days and the chest freezer has lots of sliced zucchini stored.

We picked one cucumber last week!!! It was a great day for preschooler, who ate the whole bowl of sliced cucumber before anyone else made it to the dinner table. So, it's the summer of the lone cucumber.

We have lots of kale sitting in the garden. It's fun to chop it up into any soup. I even made a pizza with kale pesto sauce. It takes a lot more cooking than you'd think by looking at it. Cook it as long as you would carrot slices, at least.

I continue to be amazed by the production of my little garden for such an off year. We are getting more than we can keep up with each day, and we are eating more vegetables than ever. One of my lessons this year is to always grow a small tomato. Those Honey Bunch grape tomatoes are producing just like it's been a hot summer. They don't care about the rain or the cold. They keep growing and ripening up and looking healthy . They're so much fun, and they taste great!

There's Always Something

This year, the garden may seem slower than usual, but since the harvesting began, there's always been something from the garden for dinner. Last night we had turkey cakes (mini turkey meatloaves broiled like burgers) with a big Oregon Spring tomato chopped up and mixed in. On the side we had sliced fresh zucchini with ranch dip. The only veggies we are buying are potatoes and slicing onions. Those are too cheap at the market to be worth the space in my little garden.


We are loving our Honey Bunch grape tomatoes! They are so sweet, I barely recognize them as tomatoes, which is a good thing for the kids and I. We can just hang out by the plants and have a tomato snack. The plants are also staying especially healthy. Only one has yellowing leaves, and that one is in a pot, so I don't know if that is part of the problem. The other three, planted in the ground against the south facing wall, are beautifully green despite being surrounded by other sickly looking tomato plants. The Honey Bunch tomatoes are listed as resistant to verticillium and fusarium. The funny thing is, my Roma VF tomatoes are listed the same yet they are the ones looking the most sickly this year. Could it be late blight? I am trying not to let the sickly plants bother me. They are still producing tomatoes so really I need to let it go!


You have to take what the weather gives you. This year we got a cold and wet June and yet we have plenty to harvest. We just have different vegetables than years past. Still no cucumbers, but plenty of Kale! I am so glad I planted a variety of vegetables. Crop diversification is keeping dinner fresh.

These Gypsy sweet peppers are getting pretty big. I wonder which will be the first to begin to turn red?

Honey Bunch grape tomatoes.

The main vegetable garden. View from our rooftop. As usual, the zucchini is taking over and feeding us well. The "Eight Ball" zucchini is fun, but we've decided we like the regular green zucchini better and next year will try a yellow variety as well. There is a pumpkin growing in there. It's fun for the kids to have a pumpkin patch in the back yard. I enjoy having plenty of green onions to cook with. I've planted a second set of dill and cilantro. The kale is supposed to keep into winter, so we will see how long we eat out of the garden this year.

The main vegetable garden. Here you can see my second planting of kohlrabi, center front, and of kale front left.