Thyme To Garden Now

7/4 Harvest - Red, White... and Orange!

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 04:01:00 +0000

We pulled a few carrots this weekend to see how they were sizing up. I sowed these carrot seeds in early April, so theoretically they should have had enough time to reach full size after three months, but root crops always seem to take longer to size up in our garden. These carrots were still too small, but I'm hopeful that the carrots will grow much bigger and better in our new garden this year compared to our pitiful carrots from last year.

This year, in addition to the same carrots from last year (Short 'n Sweet variety), we're growing a Kaleidoscope Mix of Imperator carrots. After a quick taste test, we decided that the colorful carrots don't taste much better than "normal" carrots, but the variety of colors is always fun, and one of the advantages of growing vegetables at home is being able to grow things that you can't normally get from the grocery store.

This is over seven pounds of turnip. The turnips ranged in size from toothpick (the ones that didn't size up for whatever reason) to racquetball (slightly smaller than a tennis ball). Keith has a theory that whatever he does not want to eat from the garden, like turnip, grows really well effortlessly, and whatever he does like to eat takes a lot of effort to grow. So far, it seems to be true! He has a coworker who actually likes turnips, including green tops, so he will be the lucky recipient of 7 pounds of organic homegrown turnip, complete with flea beetle holes on the leaves, on Tuesday.

This was our last head of spring-planted China Choy. We really enjoyed our asian greens this spring. I direct sowed a few more seeds in the garden to see if they would grow at all over the summer, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll probably do a large fall planting and hope that they survive the cabbage worm attack. Those nasty green worms seem to be much more active in the fall than in the spring.

Sugar snap peas and Mammoth Melting Snow peas. I was surprised that the pea vines were still producing, but as long as we get a couple of servings of fresh peas a week, I'm a happy gardener.

Here is our first green bean harvest of the year - golden wax bean and some other variety whose name escapes me right now. Just a handful this week, but I'm hoping that the yield improves as the weeks go by. The beans aren't looking very healthy at the moment in the garden. They had a rough start this year with something eating holes in their leaves. Then they recovered and grew a few more healthy green leaves, but now many of the plants have yellow or lime-green leaves. I'm not sure what's ailing them so early in the season.

A bit of dill and parsley to mix in with our salad. We love the flavor of a variety of fresh herbs mixed in salad. Well, I love it, Keith probably just tolerates it.

I harvested ten bulbs of garlic, which is about half of our garlic. I braided the green tops and let them hang to dry in the garage, because we don't have a shed or a basement. Keith walked in there today and said it smelled like the garage had bad garlic breath.

Happy Fourth of July and Harvest Monday!

Asian Greens 5.55 oz
Green Onions 5.20 oz
Garlic 1.30 oz (one bulb of fresh garlic; remaining harvest will be weighed after curing)
Peas 8.60 oz
Carrots 1.75 oz
Turnips 113.50 oz
Green beans 2.80 oz
Herbs 1.10 oz
Weekly Total 139.80 oz, or 8.73 lbs
2011 Total 23.44 lbs

Compost Squash

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 01:40:00 +0000

The mystery volunteer squash that sprouted out of our compost bin is growing really well, better than any of the other squash plants growing properly in our raised bed. I'm a bit skeptical of how this will turn out, because I thought that our compost had too much green stuff and not enough brown stuff. It's hard to get brown stuff when we hardly have any trees around to supply us with dry leaves. We also have not been turning the compost much for aeration. Doesn't that mean everything inside, including the roots of this squash, will just rot and get yucky? But so far, this plant doesn't seem very aware of its perilous environment.

In fact, I even spotted a few female flowers last weekend, including this little baby. I'm thinking that this might be a spaghetti squash? This is our first year growing any type of winter squash, so it's all new to me!

6/27 Harvest Monday - First Pinor Noir Pepper and Garlic

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:01:00 +0000

We got a lot of rain and the weather cooled down a little bit, and the garden rewarded us with plentiful harvest this week.

The pea vines are still hanging in there, and I harvested small handfuls of snow peas both Saturday and Sunday. We also harvested our first Pinot Noir sweet pepper. It was very small because the plant is still too small. We probably should have pinched the flower to allow the plant to grow bigger before letting a pepper grow, but sometimes we just don't do what we should, for one reason or another. I'm hoping that now that we harvested this pepper, the plant can recover and grow bigger before having to support more peppers. The small size aside, this pepper is really beautifully purple.

The wetter and cooler weather was also good for our lettuce harvest. Somehow they seemed to have gotten less bitter over the last week, if that's possible. So now, instead of having semi-bitter lettuce, we have quarter-bitter lettuce. (Actually, I just had a large salad after writing this post, and the lettuce was hardly bitter at all. Woohoo for lettuce recovery, as temporary as it may be!)

Our first garlic harvest. I wrote about our first garlic harvest in a bit more detail in yesterday's post.

Fordhook Giant Chard and Red Russian Kale. These are both hardy greens (kale more so than chard, I think) that grow well in the garden and taste great cooked lightly, too.

Another small handful of peas harvested on Sunday

This is pretty much the last of China Choy (seeds shared by Ottawa Gardener). The leaves now have tons of pinhead-sized holes from flea beetles (I think that's what they are), but they will still taste good. These were Keith's favorite vegetables this spring. They grew really well in the garden this spring without any cabbage looper damage. I also grew bok choy and tatsoi, but they bolted much earlier than China Choy, so this is definitely our favorite. I'm letting a few plants bolt (you can see a few yellow flower petals that got stuck to some of the leaves in the picture) and go to seed so I can collect lots of seeds for next season. Keith would like me to plant a whole bed full of these next year. Since each of our beds is 12 ft x 4 ft, that would be a LOT of china choy! I also harvested a bunch of green onions.

Collection of this week's harvest, minus the lettuce from Saturday.

Happy Harvest Monday, everyone!

Lettuce Mix 40.00 oz
Swiss Chard 16.60 oz
Red Russian Kale 5.70 oz
Asian Greens 9.35 oz
Green Onions 8.70 oz
Garlic 1.75 oz
Peas 2.60 oz
Sweet Peppers 0.70 oz
Weekly Total 85.40 oz, or 5.34 lbs
2011 Total 14.71 lbs

First Time Harvesting Garlic

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 16:49:00 +0000

The softneck garlic from the grocery store that I planted last Halloween were starting to look like they might be ready to be harvested. But since this is our first time growing garlic, I wasn't sure if they were really ready. I read somewhere that they are ready to pull when the bottom leaves start to turn brown, and then I read somewhere else that they are ready when the whole plant flops over. My garlic plants definitely have some browning leaves, but they haven't flopped over yet, so I decided to pull one to see how it looked. Keith did the honor of pulling it out of the soil ("this thing is really stuck in here!"), and we did a quick happy dance when we saw that a perfectly shaped head of garlic was attached to the bottom of three feet of wilty garlic greens.

Well, I had to see what it looked under all those outer layers, so I peeled it right up. I noticed that the normal papery garlic skin was absent from this fresh head of garlic. Instead, the outer layers protecting the garlic cloves felt a little juicy, fleshy, and hmm, fresh? I'm guessing that the paper skins come from proper curing of homegrown garlic.

After all the layers were peeled off, I ended up with six beautiful cloves of garlic. I haven't tasted it, so I can't speak to the flavor, but by the looks of it, I'm pretty happy with our grocery store garlic growing success! As for the size, I feel like they could be a little bigger, so I'm going to leave the remaining plants in the garden a little longer, maybe another week or two, and see if they can grow any more.

Building Tomato Trellis Structures

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 03:27:00 +0000

We are growing tomatoes in two of our six raised beds. Bed #5 has one main row of indeterminate heirloom tomatoes plus a few more smaller variety tomatoes (Tiny Tim and Patio). Bed #6 sort of has two main rows of indeterminate heirloom tomatoes - "sort of" because the plants are not all in neat lines. I have a good excuse for this disarray.

My excuse is that I planted some of my dying tomato seedlings in these beds hoping for the best, and when it looked like "best" wasn't going to happen, I went out and bought some tomato transplants to replace them. When I planted the store-bought transplants, I should have pulled the home-grown dying ones, but I just couldn't do it. They looked sickly and sad, but they weren't completely dead yet and I told myself that I would pull them "next week" when they really died.

Well, would you believe that most of these sick tomato seedlings actually came back to life? I couldn't believe it either, but somehow they did. They look almost as good as the store-bought ones now. Although it makes me really happy to see them bouncing back to life, now Bed #5 is quickly becoming overcrowded and Bed #6 has tomatoes growing "out of line." As a good logical gardener, I should probably thin out some plants in Bed #5 and give the remaining ones a good chance to thrive. But as an emotional first time heirloom tomato gardener, I just can't bring myself to dig up good healthy-looking plants. What to do, what to do...

So instead of making the right decision, I went ahead and just moved forward with the plans to build trellis structures for them. After reviewing numerous tomato support options (various shapes of cages, stakes, weaving, etc.) on the web and on fellow gardeners' blogs, we decided to do what we do best and improvise our own trellis structure using the most economical option we could find at the local Home Depot, which turned out to be 10-foot electrical conduits and string.

This is a front-view of our Bed #5. In the front part of the bed are carrots, Patio and Tiny Tim tomatoes, and some basil. In the middle are onions. The back part of the bed has all tomatoes. For the trellis structure, Keith pounded four 10-foot electrical conduits two feet in the ground (thus giving us 8-foot vertical support), and tied another 10-foot section across the top using expert lashing skills from his Boy Scout days. We then tied three sets of strings horizontally across the four vertical poles in 10-inch intervals. On the right side of the picture, you can also see a few vertically tied strings, because I wanted to experiment with both vertical and horizontal string options.

I secured each tomato plant to the horizontal string using Velcro plant ties. As the tomatoes grow taller, more strings will be tied every 10-inches and the plants will be secured to the strings using the same method.

In Bed #6, we designed the trellis structure a bit differently. We pounded three rows of four 10-foot electrical conduits two feet in the ground. Each column of three poles was tied to a 2.5 ft section of electrical conduit for additional stability. The trellis structures in both Beds #5 and #6 were further stabilized with strings anchored down like guy-wires. In the above picture, you can also see some shorter vertical green poles in the foreground - never mind them, they are part of my makeshift bean/cucumber trellis in Bed #3.

Keith then created what I now think of as Tomato Jungle Gym in Bed #6. He tied strings every which way. Ha, just kidding. The way he tied these strings was actually very methodical - horizontally across each of the three rows (each row with four poles), and then diagonally between each column from first row to third row. He tied two sets like this about a foot apart, and plans to tie more as the plants grow taller. I don't know if I described that very well, but hopefully you can see what I meant by looking at the pictures.

Here's a side view of Bed #6. This bed isn't quite as crowded as Bed #5, but the plants are not planted in two neat lines, so this Jungle Gym structure will hopefully work well to catch and support various tomato branches as the plants grow up and out.

These pictures were all taken last Sunday, and this week has been warm and rainy in Indianapolis, so I'm hoping to see some good growing process when I get back home this weekend. I don't know if these heirlooms will really grow up to and maybe even past 8 feet tall, but I'm certainly hoping!

Saving Brassica Seeds

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 02:37:00 +0000

I collected seeds from a brassica plant for the first time last weekend. I am almost certain - hmm, let's say about 90 percent sure - that these seeds are from a bolted bok choy originally planted sometime last fall and overwintered in our weedy side garden. But if I'm wrong, then they are from a bolted tatsoi plant, also overwintered. I'm not too worried about not knowing the exact plant variety, because they both grow very similarly in our garden (the typical rosette growing pattern of tatsoi was very difficult to see in my garden last year) and we like the flavor of both.

This small bagful of seeds came from just a part of one bolted plant, so I now know that if I ever want to collect brassica seeds again, I only need to let one plant bolt and go to seed. This is already probably way more bok choy seeds than I could possibly plant in one season anyway.

The entire seed collecting process was pretty easy and simple. The bolted bok choy put out a long flower stalk that bloomed small yellow flowers for a few weeks, and before I knew it, there were seed pods. The seed pods started out thin and green, then became more swollen, and finally turned brown and dry, as pictured above. If the pods get too mature/dry, they will split and explode (literally) on their own and scatter their seeds everywhere. I'm sure I'll see some volunteers growing in this part of the garden later this fall or next year.

I collected the brown seed pods and gently rubbed them between my fingers to get the seeds out of them. It was a little bit tedious separating out the remaining empty pods (aka chaff) from the collected tiny seeds, but I figured seed saving was worth at least that much effort. If I had to process a greater quantity of seeds, I might have used a large bowl to collect the pods, but for the relatively small quantity that I collected, this large plastic lid I used was fine.

Although this is the first time that I collected seeds from a bok choy plant, I'm guessing that the process is the same for all brassica plants like Asian greens, cabbage, broccoli, radish, kale, etc. Right now there are some bolted daikon radishes in my garden and the seed pods on those plants are very plump, almost like pea pods. I'm curious to see how they will change when they are mature.

Daikon radish seed pods

6/20 Harvest - Not so Grand Debut of Turnip Greens

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 04:01:00 +0000

We spent a large part of this weekend building our tomato trellis structure with 10-foot electrical conduits, and spent half that time waiting for the rain and lightning to pass so we could actually work outside. It took a lot of time, effort and muscles (more Keith's than mine), but I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. I'll post some pictures of it later this week, but for now, it's Harvest Monday time!

Our cayenne pepper plant that we overwintered indoors last winter is still growing happily indoors. It's basically a self-sufficient houseplant at this point and it continues to produce a few peppers every month or so. Since I actually remembered to harvest them this weekend, I even took a few green ones.

Swiss chard, Red Russian kale, and one red onion harvested as green onion

Mammoth Melting snow peas. These and sugar snap peas have been my favorite spring vegetables so far. They are super delicious just lightly stir-fried. For Sunday lunch, I put them in the same cast iron griddle with some mahi mahi filets, and they cooked up beautifully on the hot griddle without even stirring. Unfortunately, the pea vines are looking even worse now than they did last week. I'm afraid they won't last much longer in the heat.

This is our first year growing and tasting turnip, and quite possibly our last year. Since the roots are still very small, there wasn't much to eat of them, but I steamed the green tops after finding out that they are edible. Well, "edible" may be a subjective term, because Keith made the most pathetic "I'm never eating this again" face. I didn't think it tasted good, but it also wasn't all that bad. Okay, maybe medium-bad. But it's probably not something that I would choose to buy to cook for myself. So it goes into the category of "I'm only eating this because I grew it."

Sadly, our lettuce is starting to get bitter. I harvested some Prizehead, Red Romaine, and Quattro Stagioni (seeds shared by Robin). Although he rejected the turnip greens, Keith did eat two large salads made with this semi-bitter lettuce, so all was not lost with the harvesting of greens this weekend.

Lettuce Mix 13.0 oz
Swiss Chard 6.5 oz
Red Russian Kale 1.5 oz
Turnips 9.0 oz
Green Onions 1.6 oz
Peas (sugar snap and snow) 5.1 oz
Hot Peppers 0.65 oz
Weekly Total 37.35 oz, or 2.34 lbs
2011 Total 9.37 lbs

Rained out

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 17:18:00 +0000

Keith and I had plans to finish setting up our tomato trellis today. But it's been raining all day, which is good for the garden, I suppose, but not so good for staying on top of garden chores. If I don't get to the trellis this afternoon, then the tomatoes will have to go another whole week without any support until I can get to it again next weekend!

6/13 Harvest - Greens and Peas

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:24:00 +0000

It's been almost a week since our return back home, and I'm still not as organized as I would like to be in the garden, at home and with married life in general. This last name changing business is even more tedious than I had thought! And going back to work this week means going back to my weekly commute to Texas, which means even less time at home to get things done. But I couldn't miss yet another Harvest Monday, so here are some pictures of our harvest from last week.

This was Sunday's harvest, consisting of a bowlful of china choy (seeds shared by Ottawa Gardener), some green onions, a handful of sugar snap and snow peas (some seeds shared by Prairie Cat), and some red romaine lettuce.

Here's a closeup of one of the red romaine lettuce leaves. It's not quite as productive as some of the other lettuces in the garden, and it doesn't seem to tolerate heat very well, but I do like it for the color variety it adds to the sea of greens in the garden at the moment.

This was my first sizable pea harvest (both sugar snap peas and snow peas) this season, harvested last Tuesday evening. I had such a hard time growing peas last year, both in the spring and fall, so I'm really glad to have better luck with peas this spring. Finally, I can harvest fresh peas right off the vines and enjoy them raw or stir-fried just minutes later in the kitchen. I was amazed that most of these pea vines survived the brutal heat wave over the last few weeks. I'm not sure how much longer they will survive, though, as the lower half of most of the vines are starting to look brown and dry. But I will certainly keep enjoying these homegrown peas for as long as they last.

I also harvested some chard - Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard and Ruby Red Chard. The red ones are growing much slower than the white ones, and both will probably grow bigger with time, but I was impatient and wanted to try some last week. I'm glad I harvested some of these young chard, because they made for a very tasty wilted chard salad!

I have a lot of onions growing in the garden and I harvest some as green onions whenever I want to use them for cooking. It's little conveniences like this that keeps me gardening! This year, I planted red, white and yellow onions, and I think the red ones look so pretty harvested as green onions. I know that if I just snip these off above ground and leave the roots in the soil, they will probably sprout more green onions, but I really like seeing the red part and there are plenty more still growing in the garden, so I harvest most of these red ones whole. Ahh, little luxuries.

I also snipped some flat leaf parsley to toss in salads and pasta. These were grown from seeds saved from last year's parsley. The cilantro that I planted in spring have all bolted during our long absence, but parsley seems to be holding up okay. Like green onions, I really like being able to snip a bit of parsley here and there as needed, instead of having to buy a big bundle from the grocery store and feeling rushed to use them all before they wilt in the fridge.

One of several new vegetables for me this year is mizuna. According to the seed packet, they are supposed to grow up to 12 inches tall, but I harvested my first batch at maybe half that size just to try out the flavor. But things don't always go as planned, and these are still sitting in the fridge because we've just had too much greens to eat this week, and I figured these will probably last longer than lettuce in the fridge.

Finally, here is another harvest picture from sometime last week. I harvested a colander full of lettuce, another full of swiss chard, sugar snap peas, snow peas, turnip greens, and a bit more mizuna. This might just be the largest single day harvest we've had yet from our garden!

I probably missed a few harvest pictures, but all in all, we harvested the following from the garden last week:

Lettuce Mix 1.38 lbs
Swiss Chard 0.32 lbs
Asian Greens 2.39 lbs
Turnips 0.22 lbs
Radish 1.0 oz
Green Onions 0.67 lbs
Peas (sugar snap and snow) 1.93 lbs
Parsley 1.0 oz
Weekly Total 7.03 lbs

While this seems like a lot of harvest for one week, I have to remember that this is what we got after three weeks of not harvesting anything during our absence. But for now, looking at these numbers and just knowing how much fresh homegrown vegetables we were able to enjoy this week makes me downright giddy!

We're back!!

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:28:00 +0000

Mid-May was a great time to get married, but May/June is a difficult time to be away from vegetable gardening and garden blogging. Everything is growing and everyone is blogging, and now I'm about a month behind with it all.

Keith and I got married last month in a small, beautiful outdoor ceremony/reception. Some of our family/friends who have been following our blog even got a chance to personally see our garden for the first time during the weekend. I meant to do a post on mid-May garden update, but getting married and hosting family/friends for a weekend was much more time/energy consuming than I had thought, so the blog got neglected. Many thanks to all you readers who emailed to make sure that we were doing okay!

Then we went on a two-week honeymoon and ate our way through Spain. We ate all kinds of everything, except fresh vegetables. This wasn't intentional, but I guess that's how the Spaniards roll. The news about E. coli outbreak in Germany from vegetables that may or may not have gotten contaminated in Spain started while we were in Spain, but we didn't worry about it because we hardly saw any fresh vegetables during our trip.

I worried that our vegetable garden would just die during our absence, especially with all the hot and dry 90+ degree days that Indianapolis apparently had during the last two weeks, but miraculously, the garden sort of survived. By sort of, I mean that there were more plants still alive than dead or bolted when we came back.

I'm still slightly jet-legged, and the oppressive heat outside just about sapped all my energy while I watered the garden today, so I'm going to have to cut short here for now. Pictures and more detailed garden updates will follow soon, but here is the most interesting garden scene to greet us back home:

We have a volunteer cucurbit of unknown origin growing right out of our compost bin! Somehow, a seed sprouted through one of the 1-inch diameter hole in the 55-gallon plastic barrel that we use for composting, and during the two weeks that we were gone, it grew bigger than any of the squashes or cucumbers "properly" growing in one of the raised beds.

Now how are we supposed to roll this compost bin for aeration?!

5/9 Harvest - Two Parsnips

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Mon, 09 May 2011 12:15:00 +0000

Two parsnips, that's all I harvested this week. This is a brand new vegetable for me. I've never bought one from the store, and I'm not sure that I've ever knowingly tasted one before. It's one of those "new" vegetables that I learned about through garden bloggers, so I bought some seeds last year and planted it in my mom's California garden last fall. They took forever to germinate (at least 4-5 weeks), I'm sure I disturbed the original sowing site several times in the meantime by planting other things on top of them because I thought they all died, and we may have pulled several of its seedlings by accident because we didn't know what its seedlings looked like and thought maybe they were weeds. Long story short, we ended up with only two parsnips from a dozen or so seeds I initially sowed.

Parsnip One looked okay, kind of like a very long carrot but with much more pronounced tapering to its tip.

Parsnip Two, hmm, not so sure about this one. When I pulled it out, my first thought was "alien tentacles!" Upon further inspection, my second thought was still "alien tentacles!"

Head on over to Harvest Monday to see what others harvested this week!

Tiny Seedlings

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Fri, 06 May 2011 04:01:00 +0000

I'm still mourning the loss of so many tomato seedlings, but am trying to make myself feel better thinking about all the other vegetables that are direct sown and growing in the garden. April was a very rainy and cold month here in Indiana, so the seedlings, with the exception of sugar snap peas, haven't had much of a chance to put on decent growth. But at least the seedlings are still alive, and just waiting for those sunny days to put on some serious growth. I just know it!

In the mean time, these are some of the tiniest babes in the garden. So little, yet with so much potential!

Dill

Red Russian Kale

Spinach

Scallop (Patty Pan) Zucchini

Fail

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Wed, 04 May 2011 04:01:00 +0000

More like Epic Fail. Most of my tomato seedlings that seemed so happy and healthy after germination have slowly withered away to something pathetic and sickly. Some have yellowing leaves. Others have leaves that just shriveled up and died. There are also some with leaves that have some darker spots, like they are diseased. But none of them really grew after about 3-4 weeks. I'm not really sure what killed them. Maybe they didn't like the Jiffy peat pots that they got transplanted into after about 3 weeks. Or maybe we watered too much. Or too little. Or maybe our soil mix was bad. Or maybe our grow light wasn't good enough. Or maybe they caught some horrible fungal or bacterial disease.

There are just too many variables here and I honestly don't know what caused most of my seedlings to die, or at least get very close to dying. I did notice that some of the pots had a few roots showing through the bottom hole, but when I peeled off the peat pot, it didn't look like the seedlings were rootbound at all.

As a last, desperate measure, I picked out most of the better looking ones (still not all that much better than the one pictured above) and transplanted them into the garden last weekend. I don't have high hopes for their survival because they are all still too small and the outdoor weather is still too rainy and cold. Still, I'm hoping that natural sunlight and raised beds can work some miracles here.

If not, then I'll just have to go buy (gasp!) some transplants from the store later this month.

Ugh, if there is such a thing as mass seedling failure induced depression, I think I have it. It's really sad to see all these dying seedlings. It makes me especially sad to think about how so many of these seedlings were from seeds shared by other generous garden bloggers - I had such high hopes for these seeds to grow into healthy vegetable plants!

5/2 Harvest - Green Garlic

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Mon, 02 May 2011 11:00:00 +0000

I harvested some green garlic and overwintered parsley this weekend.

Green garlic, as I've only just recently learned, is just immature (young) garlic that looks like an overgrown scallion or green onion. When I first read about it, I was really curious to try it myself, but I hesitated to harvest any because we only planted 22 garlic cloves last fall and I didn't really want to sacrifice any of them before the garlic bulbs matured.

But this weekend, I noticed that some of the garlic greens (leaves) had already bent and broken on their own, either because they were getting too big or because it's just been too windy/rainy in Indiana the last several weeks. I suspect both, actually. Anyway, so I thought, well, if some of these leaves are already damaged, then I won't hurt any by harvesting some, right? So I snipped a few leaves just below the damage. In case you're wondering, green garlic really does smell just like fresh garlic!

I chopped up my first green garlic harvest into small pieces and used them as one of the toppings for our homemade pizza this weekend. The green garlic flavor was very subtle, much less than garlic, but we enjoyed it all the same. I wondered if the white part (immature bulb) of green garlic would taste similar, but I won't know until I actually pull a whole plant out. Hmm, I probably should try it next week, just to see if it's worth planting a lot more garlic next year to harvest some as green garlic and some as fully mature garlic bulbs.

Happy Harvest Monday!

Building a fence to keep pe(s)ts out

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:38:00 +0000

When Keith and I planned our vegetable garden expansion for this year with new raised garden beds, one of the things on the To Do list was to build a new fence to protect our vegetable garden from pets (our two dogs) and pests (wild bunnies that get into our back/side yard by squeezing and/or digging their way in under the outer backyard fence). We considered various materials for the fence - chicken wire (ugly), wrought-iron fence (holes too big), pine, etc. - and eventually decided to go with pressure-treated pine to match the backyard fence, but 4 feet high instead of 6 feet. We would have actually preferred it to be even shorter (3 feet), but the boards came in 4-foot lengths and we didn't want to spend the time/energy to trim a foot off each board.

It's been a slow project due to our limited free time and one too many rainy days so far this spring, but we finally completed the project last weekend.

First, Keith used a post hole digger to dig holes deep enough for fence posts. I tried to help, but I was no match for the hard clay/rocky soil in our yard.

We then used a piece of string as a guide to evenly place the fence posts. It was a bit tricky because this side of the garden is at a slope (as you can clearly see with the raised boxes). Once the posts were lined up, we filled the holes with concrete mix.

Several hours later (or maybe the next day, I can't remember now), this is how it looked.

Now they were ready for the next step. I think we did this another week or two later. I know because I can see that sugar snap peas have all fully sprouted in this picture.

Before we put up the fence boards, we laid down chicken wire on the ground (and secured them with landscape fabric pins) so that bunnies can't dig under the fence to get into the garden. We'll eventually put some soil over it so most (if not all) of it will be hidden under the soil. Maybe I'll even try to grow some groundcover-type of plants or flowers over it to make it look a bit nicer. For now, we're satisfied with its functional value.

And here it is, the finished garden fence with a gate in the middle. We even have a small piece of garden art.

My co-worker Jamie gave this to me last year when she left our project. It just makes me smile every time I look at it on my way into our new vegetable garden area.

4/25 Harvest - Pea Shoots

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:14:00 +0000

Our peas are growing well enough that I felt that it would be safe to harvest some young pea shoots this weekend. This would have been totally unthinkable last year, when what few pea seedlings I had constantly struggled against the hot weather (in both spring and fall!), cutworms and bunny attacks.

Since this was my first time harvesting pea shoots, I wanted to be careful, just in case it somehow negatively affected the future growth of these plants. I am, after all, growing them more for peas and not for shoots. For this trial run, I snipped off the top 3-4 inches of just a few plants. I'll go back and inspect the cut plants next week and see if they are still continuing to grow and branching off from leaf nodes below the cut tip, like they are supposed to.

I also snipped off some overwintered basil to make pizza and breadsticks (garlic basil). Basil grew fast and furious in our garden last year to a point where I got tired of harvesting and processing it. But having (far) less of it this winter has made me appreciate it more in the kitchen.

I forgot to take pictures of the finished products, but here is one picture of my first attempt at garlic basil breadsticks just before they were popped in the oven. They turned out pretty tasty, although I think I will try upping the amount of both garlic and basil next time.

Check out Harvest Monday to see what other gardeners are harvesting!

Garden Tour - Mid April

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 04:01:00 +0000

The Indiana garden is still looking pretty bare and naked, but here's a quick tour. I thought I would be a lot more organized and plan/re-plan where everything was going to be planted down to the last square foot, but actually, I really just kind of slacked off this winter. I have loose ideas of where I want things to grow, but in reality, I've just been sowing seeds where there is empty space, deciding locations and space allocations of each vegetable on the fly.

Right Side: In the first (bottom) bed, we have three rows of peas (several varieties of sugar snap peas and snow peas). These peas took about two weeks to germinate after mid-March sowing, but they have been growing really well since then. Germination was good for the most part, except for that empty patch you see in the middle row, about 3 feet down. I don't know what happened there, but it looks like about 4-5 peas didn't germinate or got eaten by a mysterious pest.

The rest of this pea bed has been sown with sugarloaf chicory, china choy, purple top turnip, spinach, lettuce, and swiss chard. They are difficult to see in this picture, but most of them have germinated and have started growing. Hopefully all the rain forecasted for this week will help with the growing process.

The second (middle) bed currently has some carrots and onions. The rest of that bed and the third (top) bed will be planted with many different kinds of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and okra, all currently growing indoors under lights.

Here's a close-up of the healthy pea seedlings, about 2 weeks after germination. After two dismal pea growing attempts last year (spring and fall), it makes me so happy to see these healthy seedlings, all 12 feet of them. We need to get the trellis up asap in the next week or two, since these peas look like they are ready to put on some height.

Left Side: The first (bottom) bed has all sorts of teeny tiny seedlings that recently germinated and are peeking their heads out of the soil. You can hardly see them in this picture, but in person, this whole bed is full of new sprouts consisting of cilantro, parsley, dill, all sorts of lettuce, arugula, turnip, beet, chard, radish, spinach, and a few more peas.

The second (middle) bed has garlic, parsnip, onion, chives, bok choy, tatsoi, Red Russian Kale, Dwarf Blue Curled Kale, mizuna, Seven Top turnip, radish, carrots and broccoli. I probably could have started a lot of these indoors, but I was lazy and didn't want to plan that far in advance. So all of my spring vegetables were directly sown outside, except for broccoli.

The third (top) bed is currently empty, but will be planted with zucchini, winter squash, cucumbers, melons, and beans. I guess I will also be rotating beans into the other beds with peas and other cool weather veggies once they start to bolt/die this summer.

This is a close up of a section of the left middle bed, where I transplanted very small broccoli seedlings last weekend. Looks like I'm growing plastic bottles here. I wanted to see if these tiny broccoli seedlings would survive outside (I still have a few more seedlings growing under lights, just in case), but it was really cold and windy last weekend, so I wanted to give them a little extra protection.

I sowed the broccoli seeds indoors under lights about three weeks ago, and I think they took a little less than 1 week to germinate, so these seedlings are about two weeks old in this picture.

There's still lots of work left to be done in this area. We have to finish building the inside fence (to completely fence off this area from dogs and bunnies) and put up vertical support for all the tall-growing vegetables. Then I would like to clean up the rest of this garden area, get some of the remaining in-ground weeds under control and figure out where I can plant some flowers. As the weather warms up in May, I'll also have to transplant or direct sow warm weather vegetables (solanums and cucurbits) in the remaining three raised beds. We also have a small in-ground side garden on the east side of the house (this main garden area is on the south side of the house) that I need to clean up, since it's just been left alone with some inadvertently overwintered vegetables and herbs.

Oof, just thinking about these upcoming garden tasks makes me want to take a long nap!

4/18 Harvest - Overwintered Indiana Veggies

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 04:28:00 +0000

A few of the Red Russian Kale, tatsoi and bok choy plants actually survived the Indiana winter in our side garden without being protected at all . Actually, they were more like abandoned and forgotten, but the important thing is that they survived! Unfortunately, this "survival" was very short lived, since there were only about 2-3 weeks between my noticing the new growth on the stumps of plants leftover from last fall and my discovery this weekend that they were all bolting.

I harvested most of them (there were not that many to begin with), except for a few that I'm going to leave alone in my attempt to collect seeds from them. The bok choy and tatsoi looked like their leaves were changing shape (became more elongated).

I told Keith that I wanted to toss them in the salad, to which he scrunched up his face and said "can't we just have normal salad like normal people?" Ha. Not if you're going to marry a newbie gardener who wants to eat everything that will grow in the vegetable garden! I think he was scared by the flowers.

This was the flowering bok choy (or tatsoi, I couldn't really tell with the elongated leaves).

Here's the Red Russian Kale bolting. Only two plants survived in the side garden, so I harvested one and left the other one alone to go to seed.

I washed and trimmed all the edible leaves (some of the outer leaf stems were starting to look a little squishy). I didn't weigh the harvest, but I would guess they totaled a few ounces. Instead of tossing them in the salad, I made a quick stir fry with some olive oil, a dash of soy sauce and some garlic powder (we didn't have any garlic). There was barely enough for us to each have a few bites as a snack, but at least we got to eat something tasty that we grew this week, and it made me happy.

Oh, here is a little handful of overwintered parsley and cilantro that also came from the side garden. I meant to toss these in the salad, too, but in the process of discovering and dealing with the bolted hardy greens, the salad making plans got forgotten.

Tomorrow, I will post some pictures from our main garden. With all the rain we had last week, the peas are really starting to take off. I have 12 feet of peas and more peas growing!

Happy Harvest Monday!

Rosemary from Seed - Update

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 01:36:00 +0000

I started growing some rosemary from seed last May. The first four months of excruciatingly slow growth were described here. Since then, we've taken the low maintenance approach of just ignoring it altogether except watering once every other week or so. Apparently the rosemary likes it that way, because it's still growing. It's not exactly growing fast, but it's growing.

Rosemary on April 2, 2011 (at about 10 1/2 months)

We took this picture with the rosemary on the kitchen counter right next to the wall light switch for size comparison. That tall stem standing straight up is actually leaning up against a wooden craft stick for support. It looks like the rosemary is starting to branch out (the beginning of a tiny little rosemary bush??), so maybe it's time to transfer it to a bigger container.

4/10 Harvest - Overwintered CA Veggies

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 11:00:00 +0000

This week's harvest is from the California garden. I suppose you could call all these vegetables "over-wintered," although coastal southern California winter is nothing like winter in Indiana (or anywhere with snowy winters).

Red Russian Kale

Red Russian Kale has been growing really well. It has been a true cut-and-come-again workhorse in the garden, very unlike bok choy and tatsoi that only yielded one harvest before going kaput. I noticed that this kale grew more green in California compared to in Indiana where it grew a bit more red/purple, even though the seeds all came from the same place. I think it has to do with the temperature. I seem to remember reading somewhere that freezing temperatures make the red/purple color more pronounced in Red Russian Kale.

Cilantro

Fall-planted cilantro grew throughout the winter, but it has finally bolted. The bolting doesn't seem to have changed the flavor of the cilantro, so some of the lower leaves were harvested.

Bolted Cilantro

Flowering stalks from bolting cilantro seem to grow at lightning speed. These bolting cilantro "trees" are at least 4-5 feet tall.

Bolted Cilantro going to Vegetable Heaven

If we needed more cilantro, more of these leaves could have been harvested. But one can only use so much cilantro in a week or two, you know?

Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard

After a slow start, swiss chard has been growing fairly well all winter/spring. The problem with chard is that pests (birds/bugs, I think) love them and seem determined to turn them into swiss cheese chard, although this picture shows off mainly non-holey leaves.

Sugar Snap Peas

Here's the last harvest of the sugar snap peas planted last fall. The vines were very productive all winter and spring, but they have finally reached their limit.

Sugar Snap Peas for planting

These dried pea pods were discovered as the spent sugar snap pea vines were pulled from the garden. Although I didn't mean to save any seeds, I guess these peas just saved themselves by hiding in the middle of the thick vines. I just learned from the internet that all peas are open-pollinated, so these peas will be saved to be planted in the garden this fall.

Short 'n Sweet Carrots

See the carrot on the left side of this picture?

Front

Here's the front side view of the carrot. Doesn't look so bad, right?

Back

The back side is a whole another story. This carrot grew right next to one of the paver stones, and I think it must have grown around/under it, hence the 90 degree angled indentation in the middle, and a few extra lumps.

Happy Harvest Monday!

Growing Garlic

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Now that the snow is totally gone (for good until next winter, I hope), the supermarket garlic I planted last Halloween seems to be fully thriving.

I planted 22 garlic cloves in this raised bed, and all of them sprouted. There was one that was looking a little sickly (scrawny wilty leaves compared to all the rest of them) when I had my first chance to take a good look after all the snow melted around three weeks ago, but now it's looking much better.

Since these are generic supermarket garlic, I'm assuming that they are all softneck and that I won't have the pleasure of enjoying garlic scapes - only produced by hardneck garlic, from what I understand - this year. But at least these are growing, and I'm looking forward to my first garlic harvest later this summer.

The peas are alive

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 21:56:00 +0000

The peas that I sowed on March 19th (because I read somewhere that peas are traditionally sown right after St. Patrick's Day; also, it was a nice warm-ish day on March 19th) have finally germinated after nearly two weeks. I took this picture last Saturday (4/2/11).

I recently read on other garden blogs about some of the more experienced gardeners soaking their peas in either plain water or Vitamin C water before sowing them. I didn't know about any of this, so I sowed dry peas straight out of the seed envelope. Fortunately, I had really good germination - over 95%, I think. Yes, it did take almost two weeks for these peas to germinate, but I think that had more to do with the cold freezing temperatures right after my sowing day, and less to do with the fact that the peas were dry. I do remember from last year that the dry peas germinated relatively quickly (3-5 days) under "normal cool" temperatures.

I did not have much luck growing peas in Indiana last year (on the other hand, the peas I sowed in my mom's California garden thrived all fall/winter/spring long). The spring peas were planted too late to have enough cool weather to grow, and the fall peas were obliterated by cutworms. This year, I have high expectations for these peas. I'm growing a few different varieties of sugar snap peas and snow peas. I planted two rows of them across one of my raised beds - that's two 12-foot rows of sugar snap and snow peas. Hopefully they will all grow well and give me more than a handful of peas.

Overwintered perennial herbs

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:38:00 +0000

It was time for these perennial herbs to come out of winter hibernation. They were kept in a covered growing rack (a small greenhouse thing we got for free to review from CSN last year) that we kept outside all winter long. I didn't look inside the greenhouse at all during the winter, but I'm sure everything stayed frozen in there most of the time. But a couple of weeks ago, I started seeing bits of green through the vinyl cover, so I knew the perennial herbs survived the long winter.

I started a few sage plants from seeds in the late spring of 2010. The plant turned dry and gray over the winter, but it's been working hard these last few weeks to put on some new leaves.

Here is a part of the oregano madness that I started in the summer of 2009 from seeds. I initially grew oregano in the ground, but they grew like monsters, spread out of control and threatened to take over the whole garden last summer. So I pulled them all out, and just kept a tiny bit of the plant to replant in a small pot. It looked rather unhappy for a while, and was still looking kind of brown and wilty at the end of last fall. But it must have gotten over it, because now it's growing lots of new soft green leaves. Oregano is going to be strictly confined to containers for me from here on out.

Here's a potted thyme, and this one has the same history as the oregano. They were started from seeds in 2009, but the growth got out of control in the ground, so they were all pulled out except for a small clump of tangled mess that got planted in a container. After repotting, the thyme looked fairly dead and stayed that way all winter long. But it looks like it's ready to experience life one more time. I'm seeing healthy green growth coming out of the woody stems. I'm wondering if it needs a haircut.

All these pictures were taken right after they came out of the greenhouse. After going 4-5 months without any water, they now have water and sunshine. So they should be well on their way to once again being productive members of the edible garden this season.

4/4 Harvest - Overwintered Peppers

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 04:54:00 +0000

I'm officially declaring my experiment with overwintering peppers indoors a big success. We harvested an occasional pepper here and there throughout this winter as needed, but today we harvested most of the cayenne peppers from the indoor pepper plant. My first "big" harvest of 2011, and I totally forgot to weigh it. Sigh. After a long winter, I guess I'm just out of practice with harvesting and reporting.

Most of the harvested peppers were already dry (because we left them on the plant unharvested for so long), but there were a few "young" peppers in there as well, as you can see in the picture above.

Above is a full body shot of the cayenne pepper plant in all its glory before we harvested the peppers. Well, actually you can't see the peppers all that well in this picture, but they were really there.

Here's a close-up with some peppers and new blossoms. I posted last December that this plant was starting to put on new blossoms. After that, the blossoms and new peppers just kept coming all winter long with hardly a break, which we thought was pretty cool. And, the pepper plant stayed green and healthy the whole time. The best part about it all was that this plant required pretty much zero maintenance from us, aside from watering once every week or two. Ahh, if only the rest of vegetable gardening was that simple.

Keith asked me if I was going to put the plant outside again after the weather warms up. And the answer is... I haven't decided. My first thought was, why fix something if it's not broken? But who knows, maybe it will do even better outdoors in the summer heat.

Aside from the peppers, there's been many new garden activities and I'm past due on some garden updates. Without making any promises, I'll try to post more often this week to catch up on all the garden happenings.

Happy Harvest Monday!

Growing Tomato Seedlings

noreply@blogger.com (thyme2garden) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 05:02:00 +0000

I'm worried about my rear, er, I mean, my peas. I thought I was doing the right thing by direct sowing my peas right after St. Patrick's Day, when it felt nice and warm (relatively speaking). I thought the spring was finally here. Unfortunately, the frigid winter weather came back to Indiana right after I sowed my peas, and now I'm worried that they are all toast. I guess I will find out soon.

In the meantime, I've been busy tending to the indoor tomato seedlings.

Yes, these are all tomato seedlings, with a few peppers thrown in for good measure. I didn't actually mean to grow so many tomatoes this year, but I was gifted a stack of tomato seed envelopes (15+ heirloom varieties) that were about 6 years old by a Craigslister last year, and I wanted to see if any of them were still viable. So I planted them all by throwing 6 seeds (of the same variety) into each cell of the cell packs, and wouldn't you know it, I saw germination in just about every single cell with anywhere from 1-6 sprouts. Ack, I felt like the gardener version of Octomom. Right now, I have multiple seedlings per variety growing under lights, but I'll probably end up transplanting only one plant per variety. I would grow more, but I don't think I have enough room in the garden.

By the way, this is the new grow light setup that I convinced Keith to build for me. After considering various less-than-optimum options for a grow light setup in the house (we just don't have any extra room to set up tables and hang lights), Keith came up with the brilliant idea of hanging a couple of shop lights under the breakfast bar and re-purposing a spare shelf piece (the kind for closets) to support seedling trays. At the moment, the shelf is propped up by a couple of bricks sitting on the bar stools so that the seedlings can be close to the lights, and we'll adjust/remove the bricks as the seedlings grow taller to give them more growing room.

All of the seeds were first germinated in recycled egg cartons and cell packs in our grow box. But I discovered that the seedlings were leaning towards the light, which is unfortunately set up vertically in the middle of the grow box.

I was really losing sleep thinking about how these seedlings were growing leaning towards the light. But now that we have a new grow light setup, hopefully these babies will grow up straight.

Speaking of babies, these tomatoes are going to be ahem, "legitimate" babies because Keith and I are getting married in May. Of all the things to fuss about over planning a wedding, would you believe that one of my top concerns is how the vegetable garden is going to fare without us during our two week honeymoon? Priorities, you know.