From Seed to Table

Flamingo Chard

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:16:00 +0000

Even though I've been perfectly happy growing Golden Chard for the last few years, and in spite of the fact that I have more than enough seeds of Golden Chard to get me by until they are no longer viable, I just could not pass up the opportunity, uh, urge to try a new variety. How could I resist when it has an evocative name such as Flamingo? Well, the plant certainly lives up to its name.

It's difficult to capture the neon pink glow of these stems. And even the striped roots are beautiful, they remind me of Chioggia beets.

And look at the beautiful contrast of the pink stems with the bright green leaves.

Jake gives it two paws up. These are just some of the small leaves from some more thinning that I did in the chard patch.

So pretty, and delicious too! The youngest leaves are mild enough to use in salads. I'm looking forward to trying the more mature leaves and stems as the rest of the plants mature (please don't bolt, please...).

I know that I'll be growing more of this variety of chard.

Harvest Monday - February 6, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:28:00 +0000

Not a lot of excitement in the vegetable garden this past week. I harvested cabbage and ... cabbage, the first two heads of Pixie cabbage.

The plants in the garden don't exactly look picture perfect, they're a bit holey from worms and grungy from aphid damage. I don't treat pest infestations unless they really get out of hand, an occasional peek at the developing heads inside leads me to believe that they are coming along ok.

And so far I'm right, this head came out pristine, no worms or aphids to be found after peeling off the ugly outer leaves.

The second head came out just fine also. I used half of the first head in a dish of whole wheat fusilli with bacon, mushrooms, sweet onion, and mild pepper flakes. The rest of that head and part of the second head were used to make an Asian flavored slaw to accompany slow roasted pork shoulder with a 5-spice rub. It was all yummy.

So the harvest for the week was 2 lb., 9.7 oz. of Pixie cabbage to bring the harvest total for the year up to 22 lb., .9 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting. I'm going to go drool over those southern hemisphere tomatoes and peppers.

Winter Spinach

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:25:00 +0000

Growing spinach has always been a challenge for me. My plants have often been ravaged by leaf miners, making any leaves that do manage to grow to be inedible unless you're a chicken (yum, extra treats in those leaves girls!) - yuck. Other times aphids have taken over and stunted the plants before they can produce a crop. And in some cases the plants have simply failed to thrive or bolted in the blink of an eye. And sometimes I do manage to grow a crop but it tastes just downright awful. I just cannot seem to grow enough spinach to fill even a small salad bowl let alone enough to wilt down into 2 servings.

But I think I've finally bumbled my way to getting a decent crop. I seem to have finally found the correct timing and a good variety for my climate. Winter spinach turns out to be a good bet in my garden. So, this is not a definitive guide to growing spinach, but here's some of the lessons that I've learned about growing it in my zone 9b garden.

Lesson #1. There are varieties of spinach that are considered "winter" varieties which I suppose is due to their cold hardiness. I suspect that I could also grow "spring" varieties in my winter garden because of the relatively mild winter weather we have here. That might be an interesting test, perhaps I'll try growing a "spring" and a "winter" variety side by side next winter to see how they compare. Anyway, my little patch of Guntmadingen Winter Spinach is the most productive little patch of spinach I've ever grown, even considering that at least half of the plants that I set out and perhaps even more were prematurely mown down by sowbugs in the first couple of weeks after I set them out. Oh, and let's not forget the night that a vole got into the patch and mowed half of the plants nearly down to the ground. The plants recovered, the vole is still out there...

Not your typical looking spinach leaf.

Lesson #2, winter spinach (any spinach?) tastes good in the deep dark cold days of winter, relatively speaking, my winter might seem more like spring to some northern gardeners. Well, let's say that winter spinach probably tastes best after a bit of frost, or at least some really cold nights. My first crop of spinach this season, harvested November 28, didn't taste as good as I had anticipated, it produced that furry sensation in my mouth that is so typical of most spinach. That was a big disappointment, the little crop of this variety that I managed to grow last year (more on that in a bit) was sweet and mild, not furry at all. But the next harvest on December 21 and the succeeding harvests proved to be much better, I didn't notice any furriness but all of those harvests were cooked which reduces that sensation. And then last week when I was out inspecting the garden I plucked a big mature leaf and took a nibble fully expecting that furry feeling again, after all it was a BIG leaf. What a surprise to find the leaf to be exceptionally sweet and flavorful with absolutely no hint of fur. Yum, I kept plucking and munching - all good, really good. So what was the difference between the first picking in late November and the latest crop? Colder days and a few frosty nights. We had exceptionally mild weather, quite warm in fact, in November and December and didn't get our first good frost until mid January. Also, the spinach spent most of the fall and early winter under the protection of some lightweight rowcover which probably kept it a bit on the warm side. It was just a few weeks ago that I opened the top of the rowcover to expose the spinach so that the beneficial insects could help me control a developing aphid problem. Wouldn't you know it, as soon as I exposed the spinach to the elements we experienced the coldest nights of the season so far. I went out one frosty morning and found the spinach quite frozen. Thank goodness this variety is hardy enough to take the frost (winter spinach, doh), even after being coddled for most of its life the spinach came through a few frosty nights unscathed and perhaps improved. I think that the cold weather helped to sweeten up the leaves. Actually, after poking around on the web I'm convinced that the cold sweetened up the leaves, do a web search for "Winter Spinach" and you will find more than one testimonial for the sweetening effects of frost on spinach.

Guntmadingen Winter spinach has oak-leaf shaped leaves.

Lesson #3, timing is everything. Winter spinach shouldn't be sown in winter. Winter spinach is sown in the fall to be harvested in winter, or in colder climates to be overwintered and harvested in early spring. That small but tasty crop of spinach that I grew last year would have been a large and tasty crop if I had sown the seeds at the proper time (read, not in the winter). But in my defense, I didn't get the seeds until well after prime planting time but I couldn't resist trying anyway. So, last year I got away with sowing seeds in January (lucky me, we had a really warm January with highs in the 70ºF+ range followed by a long cool and wet spring and early summer). Those plants matured enough to produce a small but tasty crop and were promising enough to encourage me to try to do it right this season.

Prime time to start seeds for winter spinach is in time to get the plants to mature before the first frost which means sowing the seeds 5 to 8 weeks before the first frost. Hmmmph, well, that's a bit fuzzy, isn't it? 5 to 8 weeks? I guess that depends on the variety of spinach you want to grow and how quickly it matures. First frost? Well, around here I thought it was around the end of November or the beginning of December. Last season it was at the end of November of 2010, earlier than the first week of December the two previous years. But first frost this season was in mid-January, go figure. Anyway, with the end of November or early December as my target "maturity" date and a vacation planned for just the proper time to sow my spinach seeds, I split the baby and sowed some seeds in paper pots on September 4 and stuffed those itty bitty babies in the ground (at the mercy of the sow bugs) just before I left for vacation and then sowed some more seeds in paper pots as soon as I could get around to it after recovering from vacation on October 21 and planted those out a few weeks later. So, the first planting grew like gang busters and produced a big crop right on cue in late November. Actually, it would have been right on cue if that lovely vacation hadn't gotten in the way and I had sowed my seeds a couple of weeks later. Even so, if we had had our first frost when I was expecting it I would have been luxuriating in wonderful sweet spinach for the last 6 weeks or so. Anyway, I luxuriated in spinach that wasn't as sweet as expected, but the plants were fully leafed out when the sweetening frost finally hit. The second planting didn't grow as quickly or as luxuriantly as the first planting, the days were just too short and the nights too cool and the soil too cool as well. But they are looking pretty good now and I think that they will do well for an attempt at seed saving.

Plants sown 9/4/11

All of my harvests have come from the patch shown above, that's 6 pounds 20 ounces so far, most of it weighed after trimming off the stems. When I sow spinach in paper pots I put 2 seeds in each pot and don't thin out the extra plant if both seeds germinate. The two plants per pot seems to work if the plants are set out about 6 to 8 inches apart. The September sown patch is about 12 pots, a few with 2 plants each. The October sown patch is 14 pots, most of them with 2 plants each.

Plants sown 10/21/11

Lesson #4, leaf miners aren't much of a problem in the winter. Yippee! One great reason for growing spinach in the winter, no critters inside the leaves. Nuf said.

Lesson #5, leaf miners may not be a problem, but aphids and their attending ants are. Ah well, it's not absolute spinach growing heaven here, unless you're a chicken, more treats for the girls.

Little black aphids on the spinach leaves.

Above is shown part of the spinach patch just before I harvested it. I had to cut those plants completely down, shown in the photo below, because of an aphid infestation. The aphids tend to infest the young leaves in the center of the plant and the ants attend them so that they can collect the aphid honeydew (a nice word for sh*t), sometimes actually covering them with soil particles to help protect them. I hope I can get the aphids under control now. After I cut the plants down I sprayed what was left with insecticidal soap to kill any aphids and ants that were left. My experience with the aphid/ant combo is that the ants will bring the aphids back as soon as the plants start to leaf out again so I'm trying a new product based on cedar oil that I hope will help to repel the ants. I sprayed the repellent on the soil and the base of the row cover around the entire perimeter of the planting.

Here's one of the plants a few days after I mowed it down, the leaves are regrowing already and the only ants and aphids to be seen are dead ones. The repellent seems to be working here, there's no new ants to be seen. I also sprayed the cedar oil around the outside of the October sown patch, applying it to the soil and the base of the row cover. The ants and aphids had just started to invade that patch of spinach and there was a trail of ants going in that doesn't seem to have reappeared so far.

The white dots in the photo above remind me that there is one other minor pest of winter spinach - sowbugs. They love to get into a clump of spinach and munch holes in the stems. They generally don't do a lot of damage other than at planting time when they may mow down the seedlings. I find that an occasional application of the organic pesticide Spinosad helps to keep the population in check. Sluggo Plus (the white dots) contains spinosad and there are also spinosad concentrates that can be applied as a spray.

But wait, there's another pest that bears mentioning - rodents. The reason my plantings are encircled by row cover is not to protect them from the weather, it's to keep the rats and voles from feasting. It generally works fairly well, although the resident vole has recently burrowed into the September sown spinach patch and I'm trying to figure out how to deal with that...

Lesson #6, spinach is day-length sensitive (see note below), meaning that as the days get longer in the spring the extra light will trigger flower formation. This is important if you want to harvest some leaves before the plants decide to put their energy into flowers rather than those tasty leaves. The magic number is somewhere in the range of 12.5 to 15 hours of daylight, depending on what variety you've chosen to grow. I suspect that this is where the importance of "spring" varieties comes into play, the "spring" varieties are probably selected for their greater tolerance of longer days. If you want to grow a spring crop of spinach you should find a variety that will wait to bolt until day length approaches 15 hours rather than the shorter 12.5. My garden sits at latitude 36.39º N so day-length hits 12.5 hours on April 7 this year and the longest day of the year will be 21 minutes shy of 15 hours. But keep in mind that there is plenty of light before sunrise and after sunset that will have an influence on the plants. Last year I harvested my last crop of Guntmadingen spinach on April 19 and although I didn't note when it started to bolt I think that it is safe to assume that it was sometime soon after that. I assume that the Guntmadingen spinach is suited to winter not only for its cold hardiness but likely also because it lies on the shorter end of the day-length sensitivity scale.

Temperature also plays a role in making spinach bolt, although not a primary one. Warm temperatures accelerate the blooming process once it has been triggered by longer days. Bolting may also be induced by temperature fluctuations, but again, that is not a primary trigger for flower formation. So I could conceivably start a new crop of spinach right now for a spring crop and not expect my spinach to bolt until May or June if I select the proper variety. But I won't because I would be challenging what I learned in Lesson #4, leaf miners are definitely a problem in the spring here. And I would also be ignoring Lesson #3, spinach tastes great with a touch of frost and frost is a rare thing here after January or February and besides, there will be plenty of other tasty vegetables in the garden in spring. It works the other way around also, if you start a crop of spinach in summer for fall harvests too early when the days are too long the plants may be prematurely triggered to bolt. But I think that I'll skip the fall harvests of spinach as well because I should be happily munching on summer vegetables well into October and I tend to ignore most green leafy vegetables at that time. So that's it, Winter Spinach is it for me.

One last lesson - #7, there are male and female spinach plants. Not important if you aren't saving seeds but very important if you are. This year I am going to try to save some seeds from my current patch of Guntmadingen Winter spinach because Adaptive Seeds will not be offering them for sale again until 2014 at the earliest and my packet of seeds is running low. This lesson will be continued in a future post as I hopefully successfully bumble my way through my first effort at saving spinach seed.

Yet one final fact about about spinach that I recently learned is that there are two seed forms, smooth and spiny. In general the smooth seeded varieties produce more wrinkled leaves and spiny seeded varieties produce smooth flat leaves. I've also read that smooth seeded varieties are best for cold weather and spiny seeded varieties are best for warm weather, but I'm not sure how true that is, afterall, Guntmadingen spinach is quite spiny. Anyway, you may not be able to discern what type of spinach seeds are in those packets in your collection because most commercial seed producers remove the spines. That's probably a good thing in general, those spines are really sharp!

The spiny seeds of Guntmadingen Winter Spinach

Note: the term "day-length sensitivity" is a misnomer, it turns out that spinach is actually night-length sensitive, it is shortening nights rather than lengthening days that trigger flower formation. This is true of many other "day-length" sensitive plants such as onions. This distinction is important if you are trying to fool plants into doing something that they wouldn't normally do at a certain time of year, such as forcing summer bloomers to bloom in winter by interrupting the night length by using artificial light.

Harvest Monday - January 30, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:55:00 +0000

It's time to catch up on my Harvest Monday posts. The past four weeks have been about beets, broccoli, kale and spinach, with a few teasers of chard, corn salad and lettuce for spice.

Here's the final harvest of the beets that I sowed in September of last year. They would have held longer in the garden but I've got a vole that has taken up residence in the garden and it was eating the beet greens down to the soil level so I harvested everything that was left. I roasted the beets and used them in mixed salads, but they are all gone now.

However, the Golden beets that I sowed on October 21 are growing well and I recently thinned them out and got a good bunch of greens that I combined with the thinnings of the Flamingo chard that was sown at the same time. I sauteed the beet greens and chard together Spanish style with garlic, pine nuts, and raisins. That accompanied the fresh herring that I got last week from Local Catch Monterey Bay, a new Community Supported Fishery that I've joined.

The Flamingo chard is living up to its name, other that the occasional plant that has pure white stems and green leaves. I love that electric pink, this photo doesn't do it any justice.

These tomatoes were not harvested from frozen plants this year, but I get to add them to my September 2011 harvest totals because that is when I harvested them but I didn't weigh them and account for them at that time. These tomatoes (and a whole lot more) were harvested semi-ripe just before I left for vacation and I left them sitting out with instructions for my house/pet sitter to use them as she liked, give them away, or stash them in the freezer when they ripened. I got home to find bags of frozen ripe tomatoes in the freezer. I've just lately started to use them up and have been weighing them as I pull them out of the freezer. They are quite easy to use, when I take them out of the freezer I run each one under some warm water which loosens the skin so that it can be slipped off. Then I put the skinned tomatoes in a metal bowl and let them sit out for a few hours. When they have thawed out they resemble whole canned tomatoes, they will have released a lot of water but still have a surprising amount of texture left and they can be chopped like canned tomatoes. I used a half pound of them that way in a vegetable stew and a couple more pounds were used to make my favorite Winter Tarragon Tomato Soup which normally calls for canned tomatoes.

The Guntmadingen Winter spinach has been hugely productive. I've been using it in various dishes, such as a Spanish dish of stewed garbanzo beans (chickpeas) with tomatoes (frozen) and spinach seasoned with garlic and saffron. The spinach is very sweet right now so it is also delicious in salads. I've been working up a post about my spinach growing experiences so look for that in the near future.

I managed to scrounge up a couple of ounces of volunteer Golden Corn Salad which was delicious in a green salad. On the other hand, the one head of Ear of the Devil lettuce was disappointingly bitter, I guess it isn't a winter spinach. Fortunately, the chickens don't mind bitter lettuce. I'll try the Ear of the Devil as a spring lettuce, it's so pretty, I want to like it, I really do.

The Lacinato kale has been producing well and is very tasty either cooked or shredded for salads, but darn it, it's starting to bolt already, the same as last year. I guess it is very sensitive to temperature fluctuations, we've been swinging between cold weather and warm weather for weeks now and I guess the kale is just plain confused.

Broccoli, I've eaten so much broccoli lately I'm getting tired of it and I'm letting it bloom because I just can't face another plateful of it. The bees are going to love it...

Here's the harvests for the past four weeks:

Chioggia beets - 4.5 oz
Golden beets - 1.5 oz.
Red beets (Baby ball and Egyptische Platronde) - 4.7 oz.
Beet greens (Golden beets) - 14.1 oz.
Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli - 42.5 oz.
Piracicaba broccoli - 11.4 oz.
Flamingo chard - 7.8 oz.
Golden Corn Salad - 2 oz.
Lacinato kale - 19.9 oz. (not including the harvest last Friday that I forgot to weigh)
Ear of the Devil lettuce - 2 oz.
Guntmadingen Winter spinach - 37.6 oz. (weighed after trimming off the stems and aphidy bits)

The total harvests for the past four weeks were - 9 lb., 4 oz.
The harvests for the year have been - 19 lb., 7.2 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Harvest Monday - January 2, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:39:00 +0000

This is my first harvest report of the new year so I get to report the final harvests of 2011 and the first harvests of 2012.

Here's the last of 2011:

Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli and a little bit of Piracicaba broccoli

I'm still harvesting shoots off of the Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli plants that I started last spring and was complaining about in my June garden update because they weren't growing and the rats were starting to gnaw on them. Once I figured out that they weren't growing because of invading oak tree roots and dug those out then the plants started to grow and produced a tiny crop by July, a little more in August, and then started producing in earnest in September. I've harvested almost 7 pounds of broccoli shoots from those four plants, plus more that weren't weighed because they had more aphids than I wanted to deal with so they were given to the chickens.

Di Sarno Calabrese florets

Last night I made one of my versions of comfort food - chopped broccoli braised in chicken stock and seasonings with some eggs poached in the pot with the broccoli. Just what the doctor ordered to combat my first cold of the new year.

Golden and Chioggia beets

More beets! These were used in the farro pasta dish that I still haven't written up for my recipe notebook (coming soon, I promise).

Guntmadingen Winter spinach

Some rodent, either rats or voles (they're baaack, dang it), started to mow down my spinach plants so I harvested darn near every remaining leaf off of the plants and covered what was left with row cover again. All of it was used to make sauteed spinach with garlic, raisins and pine nuts - yum. Fortunately, the pests didn't completely destroy the plants and I think they will make enough of a comeback to produce another crop.

Lacinato kale, Di Sarno Calabrese and Piraciciaba broccolis

The fall/winter brassicas are producing, this is the first harvest of Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli from the new plants plus a bit more Piracicaba and enough Lacinato kale to make another caesar salad.

Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli

More destruction by marauding rodents, not sure if it was gophers or voles, prompted me to harvest all of the celery root. I haven't used any of it yet but the trimmed roots will keep well in the refrigerator for a long time.

Diamante celery root

Diamante celery roots, trimmed

Here's some of the first harvests of 2012:

I thinned out the summer sown patch of beets. The aphids and ants didn't get to this patch of beets very much so I also got a nice bunch of greens (and reds) to use.

Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli, beet greens, Piracicaba broccoli,
Baby Ball, Egyptische Platronde, Chioggia, and Golden beets

I'm going to use the beet greens in a crustless quiche tonight and use the beet roots in a salad with mixed greens.

Not photographed yesterday was the last napa cabbage, a Hybrid One Kilo that came in at well over one kilo, but it looks like it is on the verge of bolting so I'm not sure how good it will be. It's in the count for now but will disappear if it turns out to be inedible.

So here's the harvests for the past couple of weeks:

Baby Ball beets - 14.7 oz.
Chioggia beets - 15.7 oz.
Egyptische Platronde beets - 9.2 oz.
Golden beets - 13.6 oz.
Beet greens - 1 lb., 4.7 oz.
Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli - 3 lb.
Piracicaba broccoli - 8.8 oz.
Hybrid One Kilo napa cabbage - 6 lb., 5 oz.
Diamante celery root (trimmed) - 6 lb., 9 oz.
Lacinato kale - 1 lb., 6.8 oz.
Guntmadingen Winter spinach - 1 lb., 11.5 oz.

The total for the past two weeks was - 24 lb., 3.3 oz.
The total harvests for 2011 were - 582 lb., 5.4 oz.
The total harvests for 2012 have been - 11 lb., 14.4 oz.

The harvests for 2011 were 109.4 pounds less than the 2010 harvests, and no surprise, that was mostly because the summer garden (what summer this year?) was in general far less productive in 2011 than in 2010. The only 2011 summer crops that exceeded the 2010 summer crops were green beans and cucumbers, but only because I sowed a second planting of beans (actually - 3 plantings versus 1) and the cucumbers produced well into autumn this year. On the other hand, many of the cool weather vegetables were more productive in 2011 than in 2010, beets up 15 pounds, broccoli up 12, cabbage up 22.8, Peas up 26.8 (!). Come to think of it, the lack of summer weather wasn't the only culprit, the rats took a big bite out of the summer (and spring, and fall, and winter) crops as well. Nineteen pounds of strawberries in 2010 and ZERO in 2011 - all because of the rats. Have you noticed the gadget that I call Rat Patrol over there on my side bar? That's my record of rats trapped for a little more than 5 months. It's mind boggling...

Happy New Year everyone - here's to a productive and rodent-free (please please please, at least reduced-rodent) garden in the coming seasons.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Renee's Garden Seed Trials - Beets

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 21:22:00 +0000

Two of the five varieties of beets that I grew this year were from Renee's Garden Seeds.

Golden Beet from Renee's Seeds

I'm really happy to have found an excellent strain of golden beets from Renee's Seeds. I've tried a few different varieties of golden beets over the last few years, Golden Grex were disappointing because they only have golden skin and their flesh turned out to be white and rather coarse. Burpee's Golden beets just didn't perform very well for me although they were an OK beet. The Golden beets from Renee's were just what I've been searching for. They have been very good producers, they size up fairly quickly and produce mostly well shaped roots with a good texture and excellent mild flavor. The greens are also very good when I can keep the aphids off of them.

The other beet variety that I grew from Renee's Seeds was Baby Ball which you can see on the right in the photo below.

Golden and Baby Ball Beets

Baby Ball beets seem to grow a little more slowly than the Golden beets, although that seems to be more about leaf size than root size. The beets shown here were sown and transplanted at the same time. You can see that the root sizes are comparable, but the golden beets are leafier.

This is the patch of beets that I harvested those beets from, photographed on September 20. The Baby Ball Beets are in front on the left, the Golden beets in front on the right, and there are Flat Egyptian and Chioggia beets in the rear. I harvested that bunch on November 5. The first harvest of Golden and Baby Ball Beets was on October 17, but the very first harvest from that patch was a bunch of Chioggias on September 12. Chioggia beets are the quickest to grow to harvestable size and also put a lot of energy into their leaves. I sowed the seeds for all those beets on July 25 in paper pots and planted them out a few weeks after sowing.

This is the same patch on October 16 after a few harvests.

I sowed a second flat of beets on September 4 and this is how those Baby Ball and Golden beets looked this morning. The short days and cold weather have really slowed this bunch down of late, but there are a number of beets in the patch that are large enough to harvest. Fortunately, since we've been eating out a lot lately, the cold weather also means that the beets keep very well in the garden.

On October 21 I sowed an additional flat of Golden beets in paper pots and planted them out under some (rodent) protective row cover. The fabric is very light weight and not designed for frost protection, but it does seem to help keep the plants a little warmer, especially on cold but sunny days. I keep the top open a bit to allow a bit more light in.

Those little babies are looking good, although they are growing slowly, but that's because of the short days and cold nights. It will be interesting to see how prone these are to bolting as the winter progresses, it's not unusual to get spells of warm weather here in January and February. Last January we had an unusually long stretch of days with highs in the 70's which pushed a lot of the brassicas to bolt. I'll see what's in store for the garden this year, stay tuned...

So, what do I do with all those beets? Salads mostly, like Warm Beet and Apple Salad or Beet Salad with Bacon and Blue Cheese. Or I simply add slices or chunks of roasted beets to a mixed green salad. I roast the unpeeled beet roots in a foil covered roasting pan at 400ºF for 40 minutes to an hour, depending on size, and then run the hot beets under cold water to make it easy to rub off the skins, then they are ready to eat. I used my last bunch of beets in a pasta dish that was really tasty. I'll be writing up that recipe and will post it in my Kitchen Notebook shortly.

Beet Happy!

Harvest Monday - December 19, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:08:00 +0000

We have been dining out a lot in the past couple of weeks and have more nights out coming up through the rest of the holidays so I've not been harvesting a lot of vegetables.

Here's the first harvest of celery root for the season. This weighed in at 1 pound., 10 ounces as seen below, but once I trimmed off the greens and the excess roots it only weighed 12 ounces. It was just the right size to use in a stew with lentils and spare ribs that I made up that night.

Diamante Celery Root

I used about half a pound of Lacinato kale to make a favorite snack of Kale Chips that we've not indulged in since one of my last harvests of kale in December of last year. I hope my Lacinato kale plants make it through the winter in better condition than the plants I grew last year, they stopped producing in late December and started to bolt in January. Last year I started my kale plants on June 24 and this year I waited until July 25 to sow the seeds so I'm hoping that the later start will help to keep them from bolting in January. Although, the problem last year may have been that the weather in January was unusually sunny, warm, and dry, plus my Lacinato kale plants were more stressed in the fall than they normally are. Anyway, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for better kale growing conditions for this season, we are looking forward to more chips and Kale Caesar salads and other favorite kale dishes. Hmm, perhaps I will have to sow some seeds after the solstice for an early spring planting of kale.

My only other significant harvest last week was of some lettuce that I used in a salad with julienned apple, Manchego cheese, thin sliced celery, Pomegranate arils, toasted hazelnuts and my favorite Meyer lemon-honey-mustard-olive oil vinaigrette.

Here's the harvest totals for the past week:

Piracicaba broccoli - 1.4 oz.
Diamante celery root - 12.2 oz.
Lacinato kale - 7.7 oz.
Buttercrunch lettuce - 18.8 oz.

The totals for the week were - 2 lb., 8.1 oz.
The totals for the year have been - 570 lb., .5 oz

It doesn't look like I will break the 600 pound mark this year, which is far off the 700 pound mark that I passed last year. I'm going to compare the harvests from last year and this year come January to see how the harvests differed. A quick look confirms my suspicion that my tomato and pepper harvests were significantly less than last year. It will be interesting to see where the rest of the difference comes from.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Harvest Monday - December 12, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:40:00 +0000

Most of the past week we had clear and cold weather with freeze warnings so I harvested all the ripe peppers from the late producing baccatum plants and even a few runty pods off of one chinense plant. Here's the harvest from last Wednesday.

Rainforest

Christmas Bell and Aji Habanero

Aji Habanero

Aji de la Tierra

Chiero Recife

The Chiero Recife was the only chinense species that I got to harvest this year. I also harvested a few other peppers last Monday plus all the remaining eggplants in the garden. Here's the harvest from Monday:

Aji Angelo

Corazon de Paloma and Yellow Manzano

Big Jim

Diamond eggplant

Rosa Bianca eggplant

The rest of the harvests were very green, mostly Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli, a bit of Piracicaba broccoli, and a head of Sweetie Baby romaine lettuce. Oh, and I shelled the last of the dried Stregonta Borlotti beans. I love the colors of the Stregonta Borlottis, most of them have a tan background, overlaid with lavendar, with dark purple blotches over all, but there is quite a bit of variation in the mix of the three colors.

I could have harvested more vegetables from the garden, there's a bit more napa cabbage left, lots of spinach, some kale, celery root, and beets that are ready to harvest, but we've been out more nights than usual so I haven't been doing much cooking from the garden. Fortunately, most of the vegetables will hold in the garden quite well during the cold short days of December and January, we rarely weather cold enough to damage them.

Here's what I harvested last week:

Stregonta Borlotti beans - 1 lb., 1.2 oz.
Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli - 1 lb., 4.5 oz.
Piracicaba broccoli - 3.1 oz.
Sweetie Baby romaine lettuce - 10.1 oz.
Aji Angelo peppers - 3.9 oz.
Aji de la Tierra peppers - 5.4 oz.
Aji Habanero peppers - 10.2 oz.
Big Jim peppers - 15.7 oz.
Chiero Recife peppers - 1.1 oz.
Christmas Bell peppers - 1.1 oz.
Corazon de Paloma peppers - 2.9 oz.
Rainforest peppers - 5.8 oz.
Yellow Manzano peppers - 2.6 oz.

The harvest totals for the week were - 6 lb., 5.6 oz.
The total for the year is - 567 lb., 8.4 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Harvest Monday - December 5, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:26:00 +0000

The harvests last week were decidedly green.

I didn't get around to photographing the lovely green sprouting broccolis, but I did remember to take the camera out to the garden to photograph the spinach and pepper harvest. It seems so strange to me to see big robust leaves of spinach in the same basket as the shiny green chile peppers, it's as if the garden is in some sort of time warp.

But there they are, spinach and chile pepppers from the late November garden.

The spinach was used in two dishes, first in a wilted salad that came out ok but wasn't good enough to go into the recipe notebook. The second preparation was a version of a dish that my husband and I simply call Beans & Greens. It's never the same twice, but always tasty and satisfying, and I managed to get the latest version into my recipe notebook.

Most of the Big Jim peppers were used to make the annual dish of Turkey Enchiladas that features leftover Thanksgiving turkey. This year they came out particularly tasty so the recipe also made it into my notebook.

Here's the harvests for the past week:

Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli - 15.5 oz.
Piracicaba broccoli - 13.1 oz.
Big Jim newmex chile peppers - 15.9 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 3.6 oz.
Guntmadingen Winter spinach - 31.1 oz.

The total harvests for the week were - 4 lb., 15.2 oz.
The total harvests for the year have been - 561 lb., 2.8 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Harvest Monday - November 28, 2011 (Plus a bit of an update)

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:01:00 +0000

I managed to photograph one of my harvests last week. The short days at this time of year often find me harvesting at the end of the day in the failing light and once I get done there isn't enough natural light left to take a decent photograph so I skip it. For this harvest I took the camera with me to the garden and just got the job done before the veggies even got out of the harvest basket.

The only thing new in this basket is a small harvest of Corazon de Paloma peppers, a small podded pepper with a big chile bite. I dried these using my 200°F slow roast in the oven method. I'm hoping to be able to harvest a few more ripe peppers from the garden before we get our first freeze of the season. Last year the first freeze came the night of November 24 and the year before it came on December 8. We had one freeze warning a couple of weeks ago but it didn't get that cold this close to the coast. And now, dare I mention it, we are enjoying one of those amazing warm spells that we can have here at this time of year and it is forecast to hold through the coming weekend.

This is about half of the Stregonta Borlotti beans that I harvested. I took a photograph of the harvest before the beans obscured the rest of the harvest. I harvested over 2 pounds of beans in their pods that day but I'm only including shelled beans that I've cooked in the totals shown below. The 8 ounces of beans that I shelled this week were included in my annual post-Thanksgiving pot of Turkey-Vegetable soup.

This is another head of Piracicaba broccoli from the fall planting. The other greens in the basket are shoots from the Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli that is a holdover from the spring planting, the fall planting hasn't started producing yet. It's nice that the Piracicaba broccoli produces rather quickly and the Di Sarno broccoli matures later, I can't say that I planned it that way, it just so happens to be.

The only other new item was the first harvest of Lacinato kale for human consumption, the chickens have been getting kale treats for weeks already but I don't weigh that. I used it to make Kale Caesar Salad. Oh wow, was that good, I got it right on the first attempt, I don't need to do any recipe adjustments for my taste. My husband is already asking when we're going to have it again.

Here's the harvests for the past week:

Stregonta borlotti beans - 8 oz.
Chioggia beets - 13.3 oz. (w/o aphidy greens)
Egyptische Platronde beets - 15.9 oz. (w/o aphidy greens)
Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli - 22.8 oz (spring planting)
Piracicba broccoli - 14.7 oz.
Lacinato kale - 15.5 oz.
Big Jim newmex chile peppers - 4.5 oz.
Corazon de Paloma chile peppers - 7.3 oz.
Shishito peppers - 6 oz.

The total harvests for the week were - 6 lb., 12.3 oz.
The total harvests for the year have been - 555 lb., 13.6 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

And now for a bit of an update on what's growing in the garden. I cleared out the space where the Tarbais and Musica pole beans and the cucumbers where growing and now I've got a new crop of water bottles and row cover going. Just kidding, the water bottle cloches are protecting new plantings of Flamingo chard (4 in the foreground) and Guntmadingen Winter Spinach. The rowcover in the rear is protecting newly transplanted Renee's Golden Beets.

Here's the September planting of Guntmadingen Winter Spinach (what's left of it after the sow bugs munched on the seedlings) which I've not bothered to uncover to photograph until last week. It looks like I need to harvest some of it.

This variety of Spinach has a very interesting cut leaf. I can't wait to try it, last winter I found it to be very sweet tasting for spinach, with less of the oxalic acid tang and fuzziness that most spinaches have when eaten raw. I think that this will make a really good wilted spinach salad.

Harvest Monday - November 21, 2011 and Happy Thanksgiving

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:16:00 +0000

This is the time of year when the baccatuum and chinense chiles that I experiment with start to trickle in. Both species ripen very late and it is often a race with the frost and cold weather induced diseases to see if I'll get any ripe peppers at all. And this year I'm also competing with the rats (what don't those buggers eat?!). I love the aromatic flavors of most of the peppers of these two species, however, most varieties tend to be extremely hot (habaneros and kin), which isn't really my thing, I'm a wimpy chile head. Last week I harvested two varieties of baccatuum chiles that are new to me, on the left is Aji Habanero and on the right is Rainforest. Which of these two varieties do you suppose is the hot one?

I preserved both varieties by removing the stems, cutting them in half from tip to tail, scraping out the seeds and then slow baked them in a 200°F oven until they were dry and crisp, about 2 hours or so.

I also harvested another head of Dorato di Asti celery that day. I've been using most of the celery in chopped salads with various other ingredients. One day it was a Waldorf type salad with apples, walnuts, and manchego cheese. Another day it was with pomegranate arils, toasted pecans, olives, and feta cheese. Yet another combo was with chicken, avocado, and pomegranate arils. The dressing varies, but is usually just a simple drizzle of any one of the many vinegars that I keep on hand plus a generous dose of my favorite extra virgin olive oil and some salt and pepper. The salads are never the same. And I also tried a variation on that old peanut butter & celery thing, only I used cashew butter and slivers of medjool dates.

The only other new item in the harvest basket was some Big Jim newmex chiles that I didn't get around to photographing. Those were used in my favorite Turkish eggplant stew that I mentioned in my harvest post last week.

Here's the harvest totals for the past week:

Di Sarno calabrese broccoli - 10.8 oz.
Tenderheart napa cabbage - 4 lb., 13.7 oz. (weighed after trimming off spoiled leaves)
Dorato di Asti celery - 3 lb., 1.2 oz.
Aji Habanero chile peppers - 8.9 oz.
Rainforest chile peppers - 8.9 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 4.4 oz.
Big Jim peppers - 8.8 oz.

The total for the week was - 10lb., 11.7 oz.
The totals for the year have been - 549 lb., 7.3 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

As an aside, I was musing on a short article that I read in the paper about a drought in one remote corner of Afghanistan which will result in food shortages for 2 million people. It made me think about how chic "local & sustainable" food has become in our overfed, anything is available at any time world of food. Local and sustainable has a different meaning for people in that part of the world, if they don't produce enough local food they may go hungry, they may face starvation, they can't fill in the gaps of local food production by driving to the grocery store and stocking up on imported food. Don't get me wrong, I am not against the "local & sustainable" movement, I believe that it is very important to support our local food producers, but let's also be thankful for the system we have that keeps our grocery stores stocked no matter the weather or political winds. I can't imagine that our local population could be adequately fed by relying on our local "foodshed". So, in light of the holiday to come, one of the many things that I'm giving thanks for is to be living in a part of the world where my vegetable garden is considered a hobby or perhaps even a luxury by those without the space or free time to devote to a garden. I'm thankful that if the rats ate every danged veggie in my garden I don't have to go hungry, I would throw a major hissy fit and then head on down to the farmer's market to stock up on some local & sustainable produce.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all, where ever in the world you are, regardless of whether you celebrate this holiday, my favorite holiday of the year.

The Garden in November, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:16:00 +0000

It's time for an overview of the garden for the month of November.

I've got a temporary addition to the garden, I'm raising 3 new chickens to add to the existing flock. They will be in the cage for a couple more weeks and then they get to join the old girls.

They do love their kale treats.

Here's the bulk of the winter brassicas. Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli in the rear left, Piracicaba to the right of that, Lacinato Kale in the front right, and some laggard Portuguese Tronchuda cabbage to the front left. Buttercrunch lettuce is interplanted with the brassicas.

The Piracicaba broccoli is already forming heads. I harvested this one yesterday.

I took these photos just before I cleaned out the old bean trellises. That area has now been cleaned out, turned over and is ready for the spinach, chard, and beet transplants that I started a few weeks ago.

The Lacinato kale is really happy this fall. I'm really looking forward to experimenting with kale caesar salad recipes.

Pixie baby cabbages are in the foreground. They have a way to go before they start forming heads.

One of the Buttercrunch lettuces is something else, very pretty, but definitely not a Buttercrunch.

Guntmadingen spinach getting quite big and not minding the weed competition very much. I've got another sowing of these ready to plant out.

The solanum bed is in all stages of decline. The Amish Paste tomatoes are half dead but still producing.

I think this is Katja, dead dead dead.

Fiaschetto is dead but still hanging on to the old tomatoes. The chickens have been loving these.

The intertwined Chianti Rose and Japanese Trifele are still hanging in there

And still producing tomatoes. The last couple of Chianti Rose that I harvested like this and let ripen on the kitchen counter tasted pretty good!

The Japanese Trifele just doesn't want to quit.

The Aunt Ruby's German cherry is still looking might green as well (including the tomatoes).

The Pimento de Padron peppers are hanging in there and I managed to harvest enough peppers for a nice appetizer the other night. The short days and cold weather have really slowed them down though, there are still tiny young peppers on the plants but they are growing very slooowly.

The same goes for the eggplant, there are young fruits on most of the plants but they just aren't getting very big. I'll probably harvest them as babies, but I'm waiting for that first frost warning, well, actually the second frost warning, we already had one but the frost didn't hit here.

Orient Express eggplant

Rosa Bianca eggplant

Diamond eggplant

Across the way, the napa cabbage patch is thinning out.

The last Hybrid One Kilo is looking good.

This Tenderheart is looking overgrown and when I harvested it the other day I found it to be spoiling. I did manage to salvage about half of it.

I tucked some Ear of The Devil lettuce seedlings into the cabbage patch a few of weeks ago.

And what's left of the Sweetie Baby romaine lettuces look like they will hold for a while. I was harvesting most of the patch as they started to bolt in a warm spell last month. These seem to have resisted the urge.

The oldest part of the beet patch is looking scraggly, the ants and aphids created a mess and disfigured much of the foliage but most of the remaining roots are ok.

The newer beets are not so infested so they look a lot better but they are in desperate need of thinning.

Shishito pepper plants and amaranth.

Late planted pepper plants are happier, healthier, and more productive than the plants that went into the garden "on time". Hmm, I wonder if I shouldn't put off starting and planting my peppers until much later, they just seem to languish in the cool summer weather. I'm going to experiment with more late planting next year.

Dorato di Asti celery is showing it's tendency to golden hues.

The spring planted brassicas are showing their age.

I'm still harvesting shoots from the Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli.

But I've allowed the old Piracicaba broccoli plants to bloom.

The bees are taking full advantage.

The ants and aphids pretty much did the Golden Chard in. This plant is making something of a recovery.

But this one is a goner.

Basil is on the way out, most of the leaves are spotted with some sort of disease. I managed to salvage enough good leaves to make another batch of pesto.

The Purple Sprouting broccoli that I planted in the middle of the basil patch is pretty happy though.

And the Stregonta borlotti beans are ready to be harvested as shelly beans.

Here's the Diamante celery root patch.

I can start harvesting them any day now.

Golden Sweet snow pea blossom.

Too bad the critters only left a few plants.

And let's not forget the Glory frisee seedlings that I slipped into the spot where the sugar snap peas met an untimely demise at the jaws of the local rodent population.

Doesn't it figure that the rodents don't go for the Portuguese Dairyman's kale that volunteered in the path?

So, that's the garden in mid-November and the prospect of the harvests to come in the months to come. What do you have in your garden now?

Harvest Monday - November 14, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:20:00 +0000

This could be one of my last colorful harvest posts before the greens start to dominate the garden.

I harvested the first Stregonta borlotti beans as shell beans.

The newly shucked beans turned out to be white with purple markings.

One pod had beans with a reverse pattern, purple with white markings.

The rest of the crop is maturing quickly so there will be more of these in future harvest posts.

And there is more purple to be seen in another harvest of eggplant. These are some Black Beauty eggplants.

I also harvested all the Amish Paste tomatoes that showed any sign of ripening, plus a few other blushing tomatoes, some yellow and green (ripe) cherry tomatoes, and a few Diamond eggplants. Truly, a nice colorful harvest for early November.

The previous harvest of blushing Amish Paste tomatoes ripened on the kitchen counter and I used part of it to make an incredibly delicious tomato sauce from Marcella Hazan's book The Classic Italian Cookbook. It is a deceptively simple recipe, just tomatoes, butter, salt, and a touch of sugar. I made a double batch and froze it in portions. For tonight I have the makings for one of my favorite vegetable stews, a Turkish dish of lentils, eggplant, green chiles (to be harvested today), tomatoes, onion, mint, and pomegranate molasses. Mmmm, just the thing for a cool autumn night. The recipe can be found on the Food and Wine Magazine website.

Last night I made a warm salad of chanterelles from the farmers market sauteed with olive oil, pancetta and sweet onions, and then I tossed in strips of napa cabbage from the harvest the week before last. I just wilted the cabbage and then seasoned it all with salt, pepper, and moscato vinegar. That was good!

Here's the harvests from last week:

Stregonta Borlotti beans - 9.5 oz in the shell, 5.8 oz. shucked
Black Beauty eggplant - 2 lb., 8.7 oz.
Diamond eggplant - 14 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 2.6 oz.
Amish Paste Tomatoes - 4 lb., 12.1 oz.
Aunt Ruby's green cherry tomatoes - 2 lb., 1 oz.
Black Krim tomatoes - 15.4 oz.
Chianti Rose tomaotes - 1 lb., 1.4 oz
Galinas cherry tomatoes - 1 lb., 4.1 oz.
Japanese Trifele tomatoes - 8.3 oz.

The total harvests for the week were - 14 lb., 13.1 oz.
The total harvests for the year have been - 538 lb., 11.6 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Harvest Monday - November 7, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:00:00 +0000

I've been AWOL from Harvest Monday for the past few weeks but I'm back with a big basket of goodies to show off. I haven't been taking a lot of harvest photos which is one reason why I haven't posting, it's so boring to read a post that is basically just a list of harvests. But I managed to snap enough shots in the past couple of weeks to make an interesting post so I'm doing a catch-up post today.

October tends to be a big harvest month in my garden which keeps me busy both gardening and cooking/preserving. This October I harvested 82 pounds of vegetables in spite of being out of town for the first two weeks of the month. The harvest would have been larger had I been here to deal with it. Last year I harvested 89 pounds of produce in October and I was out of town for the first 12 days of that month. I announced to my husband while we were away from home this October that in the future I would prefer that we travel at some other time of the year. I just go crazy before a trip trying to get the fall/winter garden in while at the same time I'm trying trying to bring in and preserve the harvest (121 pounds this September and 101 pounds in three weeks I was home last September) and at the same time I'm trying to prepare to be away from the home/garden for an extended period of time. All that at the time when the garden is reaching the peak of production for the entire year. When I'm away I know that there are vegetables going to waste because they are getting overgrown, spoiling on the vine, or being munched by critters. It's stupid that I put so much effort into the garden and then abandon it for 2 or 3 weeks when it's at the peak. Bleah - no more! And on top of all that, we get our absolute best weather of the year in September and October - that's summertime here and I want to be here to enjoy it. We can get beautiful weather in November as well, but it can change seemingly overnight, like it did last week. Check it out, the graph below shows the hourly temperatures from last Monday through today. We were enjoying highs near 80F for a nice extended period and the garden (and I) was loving it. And then, whammo, winter (coastal California style) is here!

The warm weather in September and October, combined with the fairly cool weather that we have in summer means that I harvest the bulk of my tomatoes in September and October, and weather permitting I can generally even harvest some in November. The bottom of this basket is full of Amish Paste tomatoes (about 9 pounds) and the rest of the tomatoes are mostly cherries. If the rats hadn't developed a preference for beefsteak type tomatoes I probably would have been harvesting a decent amount of those as well.

October 25 tomato harvest

The forecast for cold weather last week prompted me to harvest all of the Amish Paste tomatoes that were showing any color, plus a few other semi-ripe tomatoes and some rock-hard green tomatoes to make fried green tomatoes.

November 2 tomato harvest

The warm fall weather means that the eggplant and peppers generally continue to produce.

October 25 harvest of Shishito peppers, Diamond eggplant,
and Garden Babies butterhead lettuce

I'm still working on my timing for cool weather crops to be harvested in the fall and winter. I had hoped that the napa cabbages would mature a bit later than they have been. I found that one of the Hybrid One Kilo napa cabbages was starting to bolt when I got home from vacation and the rest of them were forming large heads already. I think that I will start the napa cabbages later next year, or perhaps I will try succession sowing to extend the harvest.

October 27, a 4 pound Green Rocket napa cabbage

The beet harvest continues and if it weren't for the aphids and ants that are attacking the greens these would keep well in the garden into the colder months. The later sowing seems to be less of a target for the pests so perhaps I will be able to keep them in place longer. I didn't include the beet greens in the latest harvest totals since I gave them to to the chickens.

November 5 harvest of Renee's Golden and Baby Ball beets

The Sweetie Baby romaine lettuce is also bolting more quickly than I expected this fall. The two heads in the basket below were just starting to send up central stalks but the lettuce was still sweet and was very good in a salad that also featured julienned apple, manchego cheese, thin sliced celery (from the garden), and pomegranate arils with my favorite meyer lemon-mustard-honey-olive oil dressing.

November 5, a 2 pound Green Rocket napa cabbage
and a couple heads of Sweetie Baby romaine lettuce

There's still a lot of celery left in the garden. I sure hope that it doesn't start to bolt.

November 5, a 2.25 pound head of Dorato di Asti Celery

One more head of Sweetie Baby romaine.

Here's the harvests for the past three weeks:

Neckarkonigin pole green beans - 2 lb., 10 oz.
Tarbais dried beans - 11.2 oz.
Tarbais Alaric dried beans - 8.5 oz.
Baby Ball beets - 1 lb., 11.7 oz.
Chioggia beets - 4 lb., 9 oz.
Egyptische Platronde beets - 1 lb., 3 oz.
Renee's Golden beets - 1 lb., 5.6 oz.
Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli - 2 lb., 1.4 oz.
Green Rocket napa cabbage - 6 lb., 3.7 oz.
Hybrid One Kilo napa cabbage - 2 lb.
Dorato di Asti celery - 2 lb., 8.7 oz.
Green Fingers Persian cucumbers - 1 lb., 14.1 oz.
Tasty Green Japanese cucumbers - 1 lb., 13.7 oz.
Diamond eggplant - 10.5 oz.
Orient Express eggplant - 4.6 oz.
Garden Babies butterhead lettuce - 5.5 oz.
Sweetie Baby romaine lettuce - 2 lb., 8.8 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 1 lb., 3.8 oz.
Shishito peppers - 4.9 oz.
Amish Paste tomatoes - 18 lb., 6.9 oz.
Aunt Ruby's cherry tomatoes - 1 lb., 9.6 oz.
Black Krim tomatoes - 7.9 oz.
Chianti Rose tomatoes - 6 oz.
Galinas cherry tomatoes - 1 lb., 5.7 oz.
Gigantesque tomatoes - 14.5 oz.
Japanese Trifele tomatoes - 4.9 oz.
Various green tomatoes - 2 lb., 1.8 oz.
Marina di Chioggia winter squash - 7 lb., .2 oz.

The total harvests for the past three weeks were - 66 lb., 12.1 oz.
The total harvests for the year have been - 523 lb., 14.5 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Renee's Garden Seed Trials

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:28:00 +0000

I have always been a fan of Renee's Garden seeds and the predecessor seed company Shepherd's Seeds (before it was sold). The company is locally owned and all the seeds are trialed locally and in other climate zones which generally means that they will do very well in my climate. The seeds are also very conveniently carried at many of my local garden centers and other outlets. They may not grow the seeds themselves, but Renee Shepherd chooses select heirloom, open pollinated, and hybrid varieties that taste good and perform well for home gardeners. Last year I was offered the chance to trial a number of varieties of vegetables, herbs, and flowers for free, all I have to do is report back on how the plants did for me.

I'm going to publish a series of posts about the varieties that I've trialed. I am a bit ashamed to say that I didn't manage to grow everything that I availed myself of, but I'm going to try to make up for that by reporting on the varieties of Renee's seeds that I purchased myself and when I get around to growing the overlooked stuff I'll report on that.

Here's a list of seeds that I was given to try, the ones that I managed to grow to harvestable size are in bold:

Vegetables:
Beet, "Baby Ball"
Carrot, Tricolor, "Circus Circus" (too many gophers and moles this year)
Cucumber, Japanese, "Tasty Green"
Greens, Salad, Frisee, "Glory" (just planted!)
Leek, French, "Baby Primor" (started seeds but never planted out - my bad)
Mache, "Gala" (crop filure this spring but time to try again now)
Onions, Scallions, "Parade" (same fate as the leeks)
Pea, Snow, "Oregon Giant"
Chervil, "Fancy French" (now growing but being munched by rats)
Tomato, Heirloom, "Chianti Rose"

Cottage Garden Flowers:
Cerinthe, "Pride of Gibraltar"
Cosmos, Knee-High, "Sonata"
Nasturtium, "Buttercream"
Zinnia, "Little Lion"

Here's a list of Renee's Garden seeds that I purchased and will be reporting on:

Bean, Bush, French, "Rolande"
Bean, Bush, "Classic Slenderette"
Bean, Pole, Spanish "Musica"
Beet, Gourmet Golden
Cabbage, Baby, "Pixie"
Cucumber, Baby, Persian, "Green Fingers"
Lettuce, "Sweetie Baby Romaine"
Pea, Snap, "Super Sugar Snap"
Basil, "Profuma di Genova"
Hibiscus, "Zinger"

Today's report will be on the cucumbers.

"Tasty Green" Japanese cucumbers:

Cucumbers were a mixed bag this year and that wasn't the fault of the seeds or the varieties. I sowed the cucumber seeds in 4-inch pots on May 23 and planted them out in the garden on June 10. The young plants grew well and bloomed profusely but I kept wondering when the flowers would start to set fruits, they were blooming away but there were no cucumbers forming. Then I figured out that the tiniest baby cucumbers were being nipped clean off by marauding rats, arrrgh. I had to enclose the cucumber vines in row cover which you can see on the right in the photo below.

Most days I pulled the cover away, then I pulled the cover back up for the night when the rats are most active. After a while I started finding young cucumbers, look closely and you can see them on the vines. There are actually 2 varieties of cucumbers growing up the tower, Tasty Green Japanese and Green Fingers Persian which I discuss later.

Finally, a cucumber with just a slight bit of gnawing at the stem end which I harvested on August 6. The rats eventually moved on to tastier garden treats and mostly left the cucumbers alone so I was able to remove the row cover. I managed to harvest about 5 pounds of Tasty Green cucumbers from 2 plants in August and September. The plants are making a slight comeback at the moment and I'm getting a few small cucumbers even now.

The vines seem to be resistant to powdery mildew even though they aren't touted as such. They are not hugely prolific but produced at a nice steady pace, not too much nor too little. The cucumbers themselves are thin skinned with just a few tender spines when harvested young. They are crisp and delicous, perfect in salads.

"Green Fingers" Persian cucumbers:

These are lovely, smooth, thin skinned, and seedless cucumbers. This is a self-pollinating and very prolific variety. They can be picked as small as 3 inches long but even when they get a bit larger they stay thin skinned and sweet without seeds. The cucumbers don't develop seeds until they get quite large and spiny. I love to snack on them out of hand but they are also great in salads.

These cucumbers were sown and planted out at the same times as the Japanese cucumbers. I harvested the first Persian cucumber on August 10 and have harvested 8 pounds from 2 plants to-date, not including rat gnawed and overgrown specimens that ballooned up while I was on vacation (chicken treats).

The vines are quite resistant to powdery mildew, a plus in my climate. Any plant in my garden that has any susceptibility to powdery mildew inevitably gets covered with it and is generally short lived. The vines for these plants have been in the garden since June and are still producing a few cucumbers as the calendar moves into November. I will definitely be growing these again next year.

Now, if the rats would just leave the cucumbers (and other veggies) alone next year I might get an even better result!

The Garden on October 16, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:35:00 +0000

It's time for another overview of the garden. I made a number of changes at the end of September, it was time for some of the summer vegetables to make way for fall/winter plantings. It was something of a mad dash on my part, I had a lot of summer vegetables to harvest and preserve, and then I had a lot of seedlings ready or nearly ready for planting out and it all had to be done in the 2 weeks before I left for vacation. Some seedlings got stuffed into the garden in the hours before I had to depart and I didn't have time to provide them with the usual rat protection. The rodents raided but didn't do as much damage as I anticipated, at least to the new vegetables.

This area was home to the Marina di Chioggia squash for the summer, you can see the dried stem of one last plant that I left to support one last late set squash that I harvested today. In the rear are new plantings of Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli and Piracicaba broccoli. I also set some Buttercrunch lettuce seedlings out between the broccoli plants. Those were one of the last minute divide and stuff into the ground transplants that I fully expected the rats to feast upon. Lucky me, sort of, the rats are feasting on other veggies at the moment. I also got lucky with the weather, it rained quite a bit just after I left and settled the plants in nicely before a heat wave hit.

Another part of this bed is home to the new Lacinato kale plants along with their new lettuce companions. These are taking the place of one of the old zucchini plants.

I did another stuff and run job where the other zucchini plant was with the Pixie Baby cabbage seedlings and seem to have gotten away with that as well... so far.

Behind the Pixie babies are the Tarbais beans. What's left of the beans after the rats have had their way with them are nearly dry enough to harvest. Perhaps I'll get enough for one batch of cassoulet.

The Guntmadingen Winter spinach was transplanted a little earlier so I had time to put a protective cover over it, but something, most likely sow bugs, thinned the planting out for me. This is actually the second set of transplants, the first tray of them were devoured by rats before I could even set them out in the garden. Well, I'm happy there's something left of this planting and perhaps it's not too late to get more started if I get on it right away.

Behind the spinach are the kaput Musica green beans. I harvested over 18 pounds of beans from that planting, perhaps more, I don't remember if I harvested any in the week before I went on vacation and my harvest notes for that week are lost. To the right are the old cucumber vines.

The cucumbers produced a few fruits in my absence but most of them got quite large and will be chicken treats.

The solanum bed is still chugging along. These are the Black Beauty, Rosa Bianca, and Orient Express eggplants. The plants are looking better since I treated them for spider mites and some caterpillar that was chewing on the new growth and flower buds.

Some of them are setting new fruits. This is a baby Black Beauty.

The tomato plants behind are for the most part looking mangy but still producing. Late planted peppers in the foreground never took off.

The Diamond eggplants in the foreground are also happier after their treatment for pests and there are a few fruits nearly ready to harvest.

In the background you can see the very healthy and highly productive Japanese Trifele tomato plant alongside the nearly dead but loaded Fiaschetto tomato plant. I need to go over the Fiaschetto to see what I can harvest from the mess, a cursory look yesterday leads me to believe that I can salvage quite a bit.

The Pimento de Padron peppers in the foreground made quite a comeback after I treated them with Actinovate for a suspected fungal infection and they also got some extra food which brought them back into production.

Behind the Padrons are the super vigorous Aunt Ruby's German cherry tomato plants, two plants in one cage. The plants are covered with tomatoes but they seem to have inherited the late ripening characteristic of the Aunt Ruby's German Green half of their parentage. These also seemed to have a tendency to split from the rain that we had a couple of weeks ago.

The next bed has a lot of vegetables that I will be harvesting in the weeks to come. The napa cabbage is heading up quickly but I'm competing with a gopher for them. You can see a hole in the center of the planting that I dug up to expose a run where a plant disappeared. If it ain't one rodent it's another...

And if it ain't rodents it's rot. I managed to salvage about half of this head of Hybrid One Kilo. I think I'll give this bed a drench with Actinovate.

The remay covered frame to the left in the photo previous to the one above is protecting a new planting of beets.

Next to the new beets is a patch of earlier planted beets that are ready for harvesting.

These are Chioggia beets. I start my beets in paper pots with 2 to 4 seeds per pot depending on how old the seeds are. When I plant them out I leave all the seedling to grow and wait to start thinning them until the roots are large enough to harvest as very small babies. Then I thin the clumps to 3 or 4 plants per clump that is growing from the paper pot. A week or so later I'll thin them again to 2 or 3 plants per clump. I've found that round beets don't mind being a bit crowded, they just push each other up and out of the way without becoming deformed, pointy or elongated beets are too strongly anchored into the soil and become deformed when they get too crowded. Before I left for vacation two weeks ago these had 3 or 4 beets clumped together and I thinned them all to 2 beets per clump just before I left. Now I'll harvest half of them to leave one plant for each original paper pot and then I can harvest the rest of them in a week or so.

Next to the beets are Dorato di Asti celery, an Italian heirloom that has a slightly golden color. To the right of the celery is the Tender Leaf Amaranth that is growing like crazy now that the weather has finally warmed up. The leaf color is nearly identical to the color of the celery leaves.

It's good to see the lady bugs still at work in the garden, the ants have been farming the aphids in a number of the vegetables and making a huge mess. Eat up girls!

I've tried the same method with the celery that I just described for the beets. I've been successively thinning out the celery plants until two weeks ago there were 2 plants per original pot that I set out. I've started cutting out one of the two plants in each clump, but once I'm down to one plant per original pot I will try harvesting the outer stalks of the plants until I need to clear out the bed in a couple of months.

Sweetie baby romaine lettuce plants that were planted out a few weeks ago are sizing up quickly. Behind and to the right of the lettuce are some very late planted pepper plants that are doing surprisingly well.

It looks like I might get to harvest some Shishito peppers after all, these are doing much better than the first plants set out in the solanum bed, go figure.

Woo hoo, the hibiscus plants are loving their mini greenhouse! I think that they have at least doubled in size in less than a month. Even though they may not get large enough to produce much of a crop this year I know now how to get them going earlier next year. See my garden overview for September 20 for a bit more about this.

On to the last bed in the vegetable garden. The ants and aphids have completely done in the Golden Chard. Well, that means that I'll have room to put in some Flamingo chard. Can you guess what color that's going to be?

The di Sarno Calabrese broccoli is pumping out the side shoots. Here's the plants before I went through and harvested over 2 pounds of shoots on Sunday.

The Piracicaba broccoli grows much more quickly than the di Sarno broccoli and in the space of two weeks the tiny new side shoots bolted into bloom. I trimmed these on Monday and Tuesday and fed the overgrown shoots to the chickens. I'm not sure if the plants will produce good side shoots again after getting so large but I'll give them a chance.

A volunteer Portuguese Dairyman's kale that volunteered in the path from seeds that dropped from the plants that I let go to seed last year. Not so bad looking.

A new Purple Sprouting broccoli seedling set out in the middle of the basil patch is growing well. The basil doesn't seem to mind yet, I harvested enough to make a batch of pesto and left plenty on the plants to spare. To the rear are some Rolande filet bean plants.

The beans were setting and some were nearly ready to harvest when I left for vacation 2 weeks ago. I was quite pleasantly surprised to find beans that weren't too overgrown, or to find any beans at all, I rather expected the rats to clean out the patch.

The Neckarkönigin green bean plants are looking good.

The beans were nearly ready to harvest two weeks ago and I thought that these too would be old and tough. A number of them are rather large but are surprisingly still tender and not stringy.

The Diamante celery root is growing at a leisurely pace but looking good. Thank goodness the gophers seem to have eased up on it, one of the half eaten plants is even still growing!

The Stregonta borlotti beans have set a good number of pods. You can see the plants a few photos above growing to the right behind the bolting Piracicaba broccoli. I hope that these will mature in time to get some shelly beans, I doubt that there's enough good weather left to get them to the dry bean stage though.

One last plant and dash before leaving two weeks ago didn't fare as well. There were Super Sugar Snap pea seedlings in addition the the Golden Sweet snow pea seedling that you can see here. I guess the snap pea seedlings are much tastier than the snow pea seedlings, the rats turned up their noses at the snow peas after taking a few nibbles. Gads, I can't believe what discriminating palates the rats have. They even favor the best tasting tomatoes (Black Krim) over the rest of the tomatoes.

That's it for the October garden tour. What's growing in your garden at this time of year?

Harvest Monday - October 17, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:20:00 +0000

Oh, it is so nice to be back in my garden after a couple of weeks away on vacation. Vermont was beautiful even though the fall colors were nearly a no-show and a week in the din of Manhattan was enough to last me a lifetime. What I miss most while traveling is fresh vegetables, well, really any vegetables prepared in an interesting way. I find it to be tremendously difficult to find vegetables on a restaurant menu that aren't indifferently or downright poorly prepared. Even when a restaurant boasts about the local seasonal fresh vegetables that they prepare they are usually a tiny portion paired with a big hunk of protein rather than my typical meal of a plateful of veggies with a bit of protein added for flavor or substance. So it was a huge relief to find plenty of fresh vegetables to harvest from the garden yesterday.

The tomatoes haven't given up yet and the rats seem not to have been too greedy. Counter clockwise from the top left the tomatoes shown are Amish Paste, Japanese Trifele, Galinas cherry, Aunt Ruby's German cherry, one Chianti Rose, a couple of Gigantesque (not at all giant), and a few Black Krim. And on the far left is a carton of Pimento de Padron peppers. I also have a bunch of tomatoes that I harvested the day before I left for vacation and left for my house sitter to stash in the freezer as they finished ripening (after she took as much as she wanted or gave to her friends with my blessing). Those aren't included in the harvest totals yet.

The Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli had a lot of side shoots that were ready to harvest, a couple of Green Fingers Persian cucumbers weren't too huge, one of the napa cabbages was starting to spoil but I was able to rescue a good portion of it, and the celery is growing like crazy and still not completely thinned out so I harvested another head of that.

Wow, the Neckarkönigin vines were loaded with green beans that were ready to harvest. A lot of the beans were very large and starting to get a bit lumpy with developing seeds but all except the very largest turned out to be not at all stringy and still tender and tasty.

I used the cabbage, about half the celery, some of the largest beans, and some of the tomatoes along with some frozen favas and pantry onions and garlic to make a big pot of vegetable soup last night. I also whipped up a batch of pesto with basil fresh from the garden to stir into each bowl of soup. Mmmm, that satisfied my vegetable cravings and also seemed to be therapeutic for the cold that I dragged home with me.

Not included in the totals this week are the vegetables that I harvested the week before I left because I lost my notes for that week, dang it. I might have broken the 500 pound mark this week with those vegetables and the still unweighed frozen tomatoes.

Here's the latest harvest totals:

Neckarkönigin green beans - 8 lb., 15.5 oz.
Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli - 2 lb., 5.8 oz.
Hybrid One Kilo napa cabbage - 1 lb., 9.5 oz.
Dorato di Asti celery - 1 lb., 5.5 oz.
Green Fingers cucumbers - 5.7 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers (excluding the over sized ones) - 15.4 oz.
Amish Paste tomatoes - 7 lb., 13 oz.
Aunt Ruby's German cherry tomatoes - 2 lb., 12.7 oz.
Black Krim tomatoes - 2 lb., 1.7 oz.
Chianti Rose tomatoes - 7.8 oz.
Galinas cherry tomatoes - 1 lb., 5 oz.
Gigantesque tomatoes - 7.1 oz.
Japanese Trifele tomatoes - 6 lb., 9.5 oz.
Unidentified tomato variety - 8 oz.

The total harvest for the week was - 37 lb., 9.7 oz.
The total harvests for the year have been - 457 lb., 2.4 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Harvest Monday - September 26, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:14:00 +0000

It was time to harvest the winter squash this weekend so that pushed the weekly total up in a big way. There they are, four beautiful Marina di Chioggias that range in weight from 7 lb., 2 oz. to 8 lb., 15 oz. for a total of just over 31 pounds. That will be enough to keep me happy for the next 6 months or so.

The tomatoes are rolling in, here's the weekend harvest (oops, forgot to put the Trifeles in the lineup). I still have to harvest the tomatoes under ripe because of the continuing sampling by rodents.

A new item in the harvest basket is Tender Green amaranth greens. These got included in a dish of sauteed ground pork that was seasoned with garlic, ginger, and oyster sauce. Mmmmm, yummy.

I'm continuing to thin the celery patch and the young plants are getting bigger and bigger. I've used the celery sliced up and incorporated into salads. One salad was a mix of apples, manchego cheese, walnuts, and celery with a simple olive oil and moscato vinegar dressing. And I made a couple more salads of tomato and celery with mozzarella, dressed with red wine and/or balsamic vinegar and olive oil (and fresh basil of course!). The celery leaves are tender and not too strong so most of them have also been included in the salads. The toughest leaves are chicken treats.

The broccoli harvests are also continuing, I've been blanching and freezing the broccoli for winter soups. The same for the green beans that I harvested the previous week.

I picked the final harvest of zucchini this weekend and pulled the plants to make way for some fall brassica and lettuce seedling that are ready to plant out. The slenderette bean plants are also in the compost bin now, they weren't at all happy and I didn't need to coax another harvest out of them since I have the Neckarkönigin beans that should start producing in a couple of weeks. Oh, I almost forgot, I thinned out a young Green Rocket napa cabbage that hadn't even started forming a head and cut it up and wilted it with a bit of garlic. The entire young plant was edible even though the young leaves look rather spiny and coarse.

Here's the harvests for the past week:

Tender Green Amaranth - 1 lb., 13.7 oz.
Di Sarno calabrese broccoli - 14.9 oz.
Piracicaba broccoli - 1 lb., 1.9 oz.
Green Rocket napa cabbage - 3.8 oz.
Dorato di Asti celery - 1 lb., 5.8 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 4.7 oz.
Amish Paste tomatoes - 8 lb., 12.6 oz.
Aunt Ruby's German cherry tomatoes - 1 lb., 3.5 oz.
Black Krim tomatoes - 7 lb., 11 oz.
Chianti Rose tomatoes - 2 lb., 14.4 oz.
Fiaschetto tomatoes - 10 lb., 3.6 oz.
Galinas cherry tomatoes - 1 lb., 3.7 oz.
Gigantesque tomatoes - 2 lb., 12.7 oz.
Japanese Trifele tomatoes - 2 lb., 10.3 oz.
Katja tomatoes - 1 lb., 1.2 oz.
Marina di Chioggia winter squash - 31 lb., 9.9 oz.
Zucchini - 2 lb., 10.4 oz.

The total harvests for the week were - 78 lb., 10.1 oz.
The total harvests for the year have been - 419 lb., 8.65 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

The Garden on September 20, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:44:00 +0000

It wasn't until I started reading garden blogs that I fully realized what an unconventional climate I live in. The conventional garden calendar really just doesn't apply. Yes we have something called winter, it's cold at that time of year, I have to turn the heat on, wear warm clothes, and I can't grow tomatoes and other summer veggies outside. We get a touch of frost now and then, and the peaks to the south often get a coat of snow. Spring comes around mid-February or or early March, and it seems to last about 6 or 7 months here on the coast. Our night time temperatures don't stay above 50°F until late June or early July, more like late July this year. I've been ogling the tomato harvests of other garden bloggers all summer whilst mine were barely setting and sitting on the vines like little green rocks. But this week it seems like summer has finally settled in and the tomatoes are finally starting to ripen. After a warm day here and there, we've had three days in a row of this:

Warm days and clear mild nights, sleeping with the windows open and a fan on (all the A/C that we need). It looks like it might stick around for a few days (whoopee!). A few weeks of this (hopefully) and then it's fall with shorter days and cooler nights. But we can get some really beautiful warm days in the fall (and winter too) and the garden continues to produce, gradually slowing down, until we get the first hard frost sometime around the end of November or the beginning of December. If the rats give me a break I might be harvesting tomatoes into early November. After that the garden produces a trickle of slow growing greens - lettuce, kale, chard, broccoli, cabbage, etc.

I try to photograph my vegetable garden about once a month and write a post to document what is happening out there. I've found it to be interesting and informative to go back through the monthly updates since I started them about three years ago. I didn't get around to publishing a September post last year since I was traveling at the time, but I did take a bunch of photographs of the garden before I departed, so at least I can go back and take a look at the garden last September (sorry, you can't, the photos aren't available for pubic viewing). Here's the September 2009 tour which isn't as detailed as the later tours. Anyway, here's the September 2011 tour.

The Marina di Chioggia squash plants are slowly dieing back. On the left are 4 potted Pimento de Padron pepper plants that were just not happy this year, all but one of them is quite stunted. I think that there were at least 2 problems, probably three, with these plants. First, I think that they were infected with something fungal, possibly powdery mildew which looks different on peppers than on other plants. Second, the plants needed to be fed more often, and third, the black pots may have cooked the roots early on before the squash leaves grew into that area. I leaned a couple of boards up against the sunny side of the pots to keep them cool. I've been feeding the plants once a week with a fish emulsion based fertilizer and I've treated them a couple of times with Actinovate (both sprayed and soil drenched) and the plants are looking better. I'm actually getting a few peppers off the best looking plant now and the others are sporting some tiny new leaves and flower buds. Next year I need to keep a closer eye on my pepper plants and break out the fungicide earlier in the season.

Here's one of the Marina di Chioggia squash. I had to protect the first squashes to set by wrapping them in light weight row cover to keep the rats from eating them. Now that they have tough skins the rats have moved on to easier targets. It shouldn't be any problem getting these to cure for the winter.

The zucchini are slowing down but still producing a few fruits every week. I have to treat them and the Marina di Chioggia about once a week now for powdery mildew. The Tarbais beans on the trellis behind the zucchini have set a lot of pods, the question is, will the rats pillage before I can harvest the dry beans?

There's a couple of dead bean vines at this end of the trellis. Some soil borne pathogen started infecting the plants a few weeks ago and started moving down the row. Another plant in the middle of the row also shriveled up and died. Yikes, was I going to lose all my Tarbais beans to some yucky disease? I drenched the soil with an Actinovate solution (my new fungicide of choice purchased just for this problem) and the infection was brought to a screeching halt. (Sheesh, I wish the stuff would repel rats too.)

The Slenderette bush beans are on the way out. I lost a lot of these beans early on to the rats but was able to rescue the rest of the crop by covering the plants with light weight row cover. I'll be pulling these soon and putting in some lettuce seedlings.

These are the Musica pole green beans. Looking tired but still producing some beans. I'll leave them in place for now.

And the cucumber vines - looking sad but they may produce just a few more cucumbers. I fed them and am seeing some new blossoms and baby cucumbers forming. They've been getting a bit of a spritz for powdery mildew, whatever is left in the sprayer get applied to the new growth.

On to the solanum bed. Rat central at the moment, not to mention a few other problems. If you've read any of my latest Harvest Monday posts you know that I have to harvest my tomatoes half ripe or greener to get them before the rats do. The rest of the problems have to do with other pests and diseases. The eggplants have been infected with spider mites and...

some caterpillar, probably tobacco bud worm, has been chewing on the new growth and flower buds so the plants have become stunted and haven't bloomed much in a while. I didn't have these problems last September so I was harvesting a lot of eggplants.

One Rosa Bianca flower resisted the caterpillar attack so I will get one more of these beauties (the rats don't like eggplant - hooray!). Oops, I didn't say that, really, I don't want to jinx my eggplants...

These are the Diamond eggplants, they got sprayed for spider mites earlier on which may have also taken care of the caterpillars at that time. They are just showing signs of chewing but have a few eggplants that are close to harvestable size now. There will be a gap in the harvest since a lot of the new flowers disappeared before I noticed the damage. Gotta keep a better eye on the pest problems in the eggplant next year.

Late planted pepper plants that are not growing - bleah! I think I'll rip these out and put in some fall greens.

The New Mexico peppers seem more resistant to the fungal crud that is slowing down most of the other pepper plants. There's actually a fair number of chiles that are maturing.

The Shishito and Fushimi plants were hit hard. I stripped the plants of all their crummy little pods recently and hope that the TLC that I've been giving them lately will produce something of a late crop. They do have some new growth and tiny new flower buds. These both produce peppers that are supposed to be harvested immature so I might have a chance to get something.

The Pimento de Padron plants are definitely responding to the TLC.

Lots of new flowers developing...

So, there it is, my sorry little Solanum Row. Ah well, better luck next year.

Across the way the napa cabbage patch. I started four varieties this year but only three survived to transplantable size. From left to right are Tender Heart, Green Rocket, and Hybrid One Kilo.

The Green Rocket looks like it will live up to its name. I hope I didn't start these too soon, I don't want to find them bolting in the heat. This is my first time trying fall grown napa cabbage so I'm still figuring out the correct timing for my climate.

The beet patch - I'm growing 4 varieties - Flat Egyptian, Baby Ball, Chioggia, and Golden. These need to be thinned. I've started another flat of the same varieties to plant out in a week or so.

My first ever try at growing regular stem celery, I've done leaf and root celery, both of which are less fussy. The plants are growing like crazy. Again, I hope that the heat doesn't make them bolt early. These need more thinning also.

The Tender Green leaf amaranth has suddenly taken off. It is staying short, at least for now, as I hoped this variety would. I think we'll be sampling some of this for dinner tonight.

Some Sweetie Baby romaine seedlings for fall green salads.

Here's a couple of late planted pepper plants that are actually happy.

A late planted Fushimi plant that is being engulfed by the amaranth but is still looking better than the ones in the Solanum bed. Hmmm, these got the fungicide treatment soon after they got planted out, I think that that will become standard treatment for future pepper planting.

Here's a new experiment. This is my third attempt at getting Hibiscus to grow this year. The seeds germinate quite readily, but the first two times that I've tried to get the plants to survive outside this year they have curled up their toes in response to the cold nights and expired. So for attempt number three I'm trying to grow them in their own little mini green house.

I keep it closed 24/7, it stays relatively warm at night but doesn't get too hot during the day because it is topped with a double layer of light weight breathable row cover rather than the clear plastic that covers the sides. I doubt that I will get any significant number of flowers, but this experiment warrants a retry next spring.

And the final bed. Let's start with the ugly Golden Chard. The ants have been farming aphids in the tender new leaves. I've cut the plants down to the nubs and thoroughly sprayed with insecticidal soap which killed off the aphids.

But the soap doesn't have any residual effect so the ants and aphids are back. There are some aphid mummies in there but it's obvious that the beneficial wasps just can't control this mess. I'm tempted to just yank the plants out and start over. I've got seeds for a new variety of chard to try, Flamingo, you can guess the color...

Flower buds on the Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli.

The Di Sarno broccoli was planted very early this spring and just refused to grow, it was so disappointing as I noted in my June garden update. I found out later when I dug the other end of the bed that the oak tree roots were invading and outcompeting the vegetables for water and nutrients. The broccoli took off after I severed and removed a great deal of the oak roots.

The Piracicaba was planted earlier than the Di Sarno and is still plugging away and putting out a lot of shoots. For some reason it wasn't as bothered by the oak root competition as the Di Sarno broccoli, but it has produced a lot more shoots since the competition was eliminated. I have a hard time keeping up with the Piracicaba harvest now.

Late planted pole beans. On the right are Stregonta borlotti beans, they seem to be half runners, very bushy at the base with a single runner or two climbing the trellis. They are just starting to bloom so I doubt that I will get dried beans but I think I have a chance for shelly beans. The more thickly covered trellis to the left is Neckarkönigin green beans. They are just starting to set baby green beans.

Profuma di Genova basil from Renee's Garden Seeds, this is my favorite variety of basil, very productive and very flavorful. This patch got pretty well picked over the other day for a delicious batch of pesto. I planted a Purple Sprouting broccoli plant in the middle which hopefully won't overshadow the basil before it decides to poop out.

More trouble in the garden. There is or was a gopher running around in this end of the garden. I trapped one gopher here the other day and now I'm not sure if a new gopher has moved in or if a vole has moved in. I haven't been able to catch it. Grrrr.

My poor little celery root. 😢

A patchy patch of Rolande filet beans. I had a difficult time getting these plants started, first the critters munched the seedlings, then I fried the remaining seedlings when I left them covered on a rare hot day that took me by surprise, then the replacement seedlings got munched. Sigh.

I looks like I might get a handful of beans, if the rodents don't get them first.

A few shots of selected pot grown peppers. This group is a 3 year old Manzano in the back, a new Aji Angelo in front, off to the right is a 2 year old Suave Orange, and you can see a couple of little red chiles on the 2 year old Puerto Rico No Burns on the left. The older plants are not terribly happy and the Aji Angelo is looks scraggly but it producing a lot of nice peppers in spite of wanting to be in a larger pot. Next year I clean out all these pots and start over again, although I could probably move the Aji to a larger pot or into the ground and get another good harvest.

This is Aji Habanero, not a habanero (C. chinense), this is a baccatum chile, supposedly mild but I haven't tasted one yet. The peppers are supposed to be red when they are ripe.

This is a mild chinense pepper called Havana, but it is also not a Habanero. Confused yet? This plant seems to be affected by whatever is stunting a lot of the chile plants in my garden. It started off beautifully, with large leaves and pretty purple stems, and then the older leaves started to yellow and drop off and the new leaves came on small. Ah well.

This is a baccatum chile called Rain Forest. The poor thing is wilting in the reflected heat off the walls behind it. Other than not liking an unusually hot day this plant seems to be healthy and thriving and has set a lot of good looking pods. This is another mild chile, I don't do very many hot chiles these days.

Chiero Recife, another mildish chinense chile. Just starting to set chiles. I'll have to move it to a more protected spot to get ripe chiles late this fall or early winter.

Two more of my pot grown Pimento de Padron peppers. These are less affected by the fungal crud and have been putting out a respectable amount of chiles. I can't say the same for the Fushimi and Shishito peppers flanking them.

That's it for the latest garden tour. What have you got growing in your fall garden?

Harvest Monday - September 19, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:52:00 +0000

I was a little better about taking photos of some of the harvests last week. This basket contains Black Beauty, Orient Express, and Diamond eggplants, some Musica green beans, zucchini, a few Pimento de Padron peppers and a couple of baby Chioggia beets. I made a bruschetta topping with some of the eggplant - roasted eggplant flesh seasoned with olive oil, garlic, mint, pepper flakes, and secret sauce - one of my favorite ways to use up extra eggplant.

Under ripe tomatoes snatched from the jaws of the raiding rodents. It only took a few days for them to color up nicely, but the flavor isn't quite what I want.

My first significant harvest of Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli.

It has a larger frillier leaf and looser flower head than most calabrese type broccolis, it seems quite similar to Spigariello broccoli. The only thing that I don't like about this broccoli is that it takes quite a while for the shoots to get to harvestable size, long enough for the aphids to get themselves established in the flower heads so I have to be extra vigilant about cleaning them. Fortunately, the looser flower heads are somewhat easy to clean but it is a bit tedious to have to inspect each and every head and wash the aphids out. The Piracicaba broccoli grows so quickly that the aphids don't generally find the flower heads before I harvest them so it tends to be much cleaner.

The Slenderette green beans have finished producing and the plants are looking ratty. With a little TLC they might be coaxed into a second crop but I can't be bothered so the plants will be pulled and replaced with some lettuce seedlings that are nearly ready to be transplanted.

The harvests for the week were:

Musica green beans - 5 lb., 10.7 oz.
Slenderette green beans - 8.4 oz. (the final harvest)
Chioggia beet thinnings - 3.3 oz.
Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli - 14.3 oz.
Piracicaba broccoli - 1 lb., 11.7 oz.
Golden Chard - 1 lb., 4.6 oz.
Black Beauty eggplant - 14.3 oz.
Diamond eggplant - 16.6 oz.
Orient Express eggplant - 1 lb., 8.4 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 4.5 oz.
Aunt Ruby's German cherry tomatoes - 8 oz.
Chianti Rose Tomatoes - 14.4 oz.
Galinas cherry tomatoes - 5.3 oz.
Gigantesque tomatoes - 7.2 oz.
Japanese Trifele tomatoes - 7.2 oz.
Katja tomatoes - 1 lb., 3 oz.
Zucchini - 12.3 oz.

The total harvests for the week were - 18 lb., 10.2 oz.
The total harvests for the year have been - 340 lb., 14.6 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Would You Like To Take a Peek at My Cookbook Collection?

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:13:00 +0000

My interest in cooking started when I was a teenager and that is when I started subscribing to cooking magazines and collecting cookbooks. I've still got issues of the first cooking magazine that I subscribed to, Sphere's Cuisine magazine from the final issue going back to 1978, older issues were mined for appealing articles and recipes, and then tossed. I kind of wish I still had some of those older issues from the days when it was a Betty Crocker magazine. Anyway, I'm losing my thread here, this is to tell you how far back my cookbook collection goes. I started with some basics like The Joy of Cooking (1975) and The Fannie Farmer Cookbook (1978). And then I developed an interest in Chinese cuisines so I have an early copy of The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook (1978). My collection expanded rapidly through the 80's and especially the 90's when it seemed like a general interest in cooking just exploded and there were fabulous new cookbooks to be found every time I went to the bookstore. I've slowed my rate of acquisitions in the last decade as shelf space become scarce and I had a lot of topics pretty well covered (just how many books on Italian cooking does one need!). So, just how many books have I collected over the last 35 or so years? Um, at last count it was at least 423 plus a few obscure ones that don't have ISBNs.

Three of the shelves of cookbooks in the kitchen.

One of the biggest problems with having a large collection of cookbooks is making good use of all of them. Over time I found myself going to a core few favorite books, most of which are on the bookshelves nearest the kitchen and the rest of the books got relegated to shelves further away - out of sight and nearly forgotten. It's not that those other books aren't any good. They just tend to be older books, many without inspiring pretty pictures, that get shouldered aside by the younger and hipper crowd. Some of them are just oversized tomes that don't fit well into the limited space near the kitchen. And if they aren't close to hand they generally get overlooked when I start pulling books from the shelves looking for some inspiration. With over 423 books I'm not going to pull down every one that might have a new and interesting recipe for roast chicken. Arrgh, I can't tell you how many times I've wished that I had one big index for my entire cookbook collection...

Three more shelves, there's seven more...

Well, guess what, I'm not the only one with such a wish and lucky for me there is someone who is doing something about it. Look over on the sidebar, there's a widget that says 423 Cookbooks - Eat Your Books. Click on it. It will take you to the Eat Your Books website and a list of the cookbooks that I own. That list shows nearly every cookbook that I own other than the ones that don't have an ISBN or that EYB doesn't have an ISBN for in their database (very few). If you click on one of the books that has been indexed you will find a list of the recipes in that book. You will also see that the list shows the ingredients for each recipe. As a member I can go to a list of every recipe from the books that are indexed on my bookshelf (59,835 recipes so far). I can do a search for "chicken" - 4,811 results. Narrow that to "roast chicken" - 542 results. Filter it for only Asian cuisine - 88 results. That's managable, especially since I can skim the ingredients to weed out the ones that require shopping. Oooh, look, not far down the list is Lemongrass roasted chicken from Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table. Oh, another version of Lemongrass chicken from Nicole Routhier's book The Foods of Vietnam. It took all of about 5 minutes for me to do the search and choose the recipe from the first book. Dinner last night was Lemongrass Roasted Chicken accompanied by Nepali Green Bean-Sesame Salad from Mangoes & Curry Leaves. I've bookmarked a few other green bean recipes that I found during my search for recipes to use up some of the pounds of green beans that I've harvested lately.

A couple of the shelves out of the way.

EYB offers more than just a search engine for your cookbook collection. You can peruse the bookshelves of other members. You can post comments on books or recipes and see the comments left by other members. You can rate books and recipes and see the average community rating for books and recipes. There's even a BUY tab next to book listings which I haven't tried yet. There's even more features that I'm not going to go on about here. And it's not just about cookbooks, EYB has started to index popular cooking magazines and blogs as well.

Fresh lemongrass from the garden.

I don't generally make recommendations for products or services beyond the seed sources and other resources listed on my Favorite Resources page, but I'm really pleased with what the EYB folks are doing so I selfishly want to get the word out to help them succeed. The more subscribers that they get the more resources they will have to grow their list of indexed cookbooks. So far they have indexed 227 out of my collection of 423 books and there are 6 more on the list of books to be indexed soon (5 yesterday, they keep plugging away). Membership requires a fee, either $2.50 a month or $25 a year, and even though only about half of my collection is indexed so far I've already found the service to be more than worth the cost for the convenience and fun of mining the indexed portion of my collection. It's almost as fun as buying a new cookbook!

By the way, both the Lemongrass Chicken and Sesame Green Beans were delicious. I need to go give those recipes a good rating on EYB.

Harvest Monday - September 12, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:23:00 +0000

I have two weeks worth of harvests to report but I only managed to take a single photo so this will be a bit boring. The tomatoes are finally starting to trickle in. Why only one photo of those prizes? Because it's just not that exciting to see a bunch of barely starting to ripen fruit that has been snatched from the jaws of the marauding effing rats. I took one shot of the counter top ripened Fiaschetto tomatoes, the rest of them are still developing their proper colors.

Other than tomatoes there isn't anything new. I covered the Slenderette bean plants with Agribon row cover which has kept them from the jaws of the ravenous rodents so I've been able to harvest a respectable amount of them. And I didn't pull out the cucumbers since they don't seem to be as tasty a target as the tomatoes of late. The Piracicaba broccoli is pumping out the shoots these days and the di Sarno Calabrese broccoli could be going into high gear soon also. I've been feeding the Pimento de Padron peppers and also gave them treatments of an organic fungicide that goes by the brand name of Actinovate. The plants are making a bit of a comeback so I've been getting enough peppers to keep us fairly happy.

Here's the harvests for the past two weeks:

Musica green beans - 9 lb., 14.7 oz
Slenderette green beans - 2 lb., 14.3 oz.
Piracicaba broccoli - 2 lb., .9 oz.
Green Fingers Persian cucumbers - 1 lb., 11.4 oz.
Tasty Green Japanese cucumbers - 1 lb., 15.1 oz.
Diamond eggplant - 10.2 oz.
Orient Express eggplant - 9.2 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 1 lb.
Amish Paste tomatoes - 4.9 oz.
Aunt Ruby's German cherry tomatoes - 4.7 oz.
Black Krim tomatoes - 7.6 oz.
Fiaschetto tomatoes - 1 lb., 2.9 oz.
Galinas cherry tomatoes - 5.7 oz.
Japanese Trifele tomatoes - 11.3 oz.
Katja tomatoes - 2 lb., 1 oz.
Unidentified tomatoes - 1 lb., 1.2 oz.
Zucchini - 4 lb., 6.1 oz.

The total harvests for the past two weeks were - 31 lb., 5.2 oz.
The harvests for the year have been - 322 lb., 13.4 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Crispy Sweet Peppers

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:36:00 +0000

Oh I wish I had a glut of sweet red bell peppers (or any sweet peppers from the garden), I would turn them into this...

Crispy, crunchy, crackling, slightly toasty, irresistibly delicious slow roasted sweet peppers.

They came about because I couldn't bring myself to toss out the sweet red bell peppers that I bought at the farmer's market a week ago and which I left on the counter to shrivel up. They weren't spoiling, but they weren't crisp enough to use raw in salads or as crudites. I didn't think they would be much good for roasting or sauteing either. So I figured that since they were already well on their way to becoming dried peppers that I would help them along. Then I remembered my experiments with slow roasted chile peppers last year and decided to give these peppers the same treatment.

I cut the peppers lengthwise into quarters and removed the cores and ribs. The pepper pieces were laid cut sides up on baking sheets and I put them into a 200°F oven. They went into the oven when I started putting dinner together but they weren't completely dry when I was ready to go to bed so I turned the oven off and left them in there. Of course I completely forgot about them until dinner time the next day, at which point they were mostly dry but a number of them weren't dry enough so I turned the oven on again and kinda forgot about them for a while. Oh crum, but no, maybe they're not lost, definetly dry and very crispy, starting to get brown and toasty but not burnt. I let them cool and then tasted one, and then I munched another, and one more - wow, are these good! They are very much like a tasty treat that a friend brought a while back, although the ones she brought were a pricey import from Italy and weren't made from bell type peppers. I had tried to replicate those and came pretty close but I wasn't really happy enough with them to make them again. The imports seemed to have been fried or roasted with olive oil and salt. My efforts to fry or roast dried peppers tasted good but came out too oily. These peppers have no oil so they are a lot lighter than my attempts to replicate the Italian goodies and I don't miss the salt. But maybe a little salt might be nice. I wonder what will happen if I sprinkle the peppers with a bit of salt when I put them in the oven...

Harvest Monday - August 29, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:30:00 +0000

The rats have given the cucumbers something of a reprieve so I got to harvest a fair number of Green Fingers Persian cucumbers and even a few Tasty Green Japanese cucumbers (not pictured this week). I think the rats got bored with the cucumbers or they got too lazy to climb the tower that the cucumbers are growing up and decided to graze in the patch of Slenderette bush green beans. There's the total harvest of the Slenderettes at the bottom of the photo, it should have been three times that much judging from the nubs that were left on the plants. The beans in the center of the tray are Musica pole beans, one of my favorite varieties of green beans. They can be picked when even more mature than these and still be tender and sweet. The bigger beans are fabulous slicked with a bit of olive oil and grilled or roasted, and served with a dash of coarse sea salt. I harvested the beans when still relatively young because there were signs of raiding... The beans shown below were cut into 3 or 4 pieces and then simmered with fresh chopped tomatoes (not from the garden yet) and some sauteed sweet onions and garlic.

I made one of my husband's favorite summer dishes last week - a gratin of zucchini and chard. Here's the handful of sorrel that the recipe also called for.

It was definitely time to harvest the head of Charming napa cabbage that survived its struggle with the competing oak tree roots, managed not to bolt along with the rest of the surviving cabbages, and then seemed to form a head in the blink of an eye.

The trimmed head came in at a whopping 5+ pounds! Slaw, slaw, and more slaw.

It is taking me forever to get around to properly thinning the celery. This is the latest round of thinning of the Dorato d'Asti plants. Also shown is the entire crop of Negresse potatoes from the potatoes-in-the-old-compost-bin experiment. Not a lot of potatoes to show for my half-baked efforts...

but I got a wheel barrow full of fantastic compost out of the deal. I used old potting soil and the chunky bits of my sifted compost to fill the bin. A lot of worms ended up with the potatoes and they did a great job of breaking down the old soil.

It was a good week of harvests, much of which never made it in front of the camera. The fridge is stuffed with veggies so the only thing I'll have to buy at the farmer's market this week will be tomatoes (still not ripe!) and fruit.

Here's the harvests for the past week:

Musica pole green beans - 3 lb., 1 oz.
Slenderette bush green beans - 4.6 oz.
Piracicaba broccoli - 1 lb., 7 oz.
Di Sarno Calabrese broccoli - 2.8 oz.
Charming napa cabbage - 5 lb., 3.4 oz.
Dorato di Asti celery thinnings - 7.5 oz.
Golden Chard - 1 lb., 8.6 oz.
Green Fingers Persian cucumbers - 2 lb., 1.6 oz.
Tasty Green Japanese cucumbers - 1 lb., 6 oz.
Diamond eggplant - 1 lb., 11.9 oz.
Orient Express eggplant - 4.8 oz.
Persian Star garlic - 3.8 oz. (finally trimmed and weighed)
Rose du Var garlic - 9 oz.
S&H Silver garlic - 9 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 12.3 oz.
Negresse potatoes - 2 lb., 5 oz.
Sorrel - 1.8 oz.
Zucchini - 2 lb., 6.6 oz.
Zucchini blossoms - 1.1 oz.

The harvests for the week were - 24 lb., 10.9 oz.
The harvests for the year have been - 290 lb., 11.2 oz.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to be inspired by what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.

Harvest Monday - August 22, 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michelle) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:00:00 +0000

At last, the first ripe tomato! Meet Katja, the only tomato to ripen so far this "summer". No wait, I take that back, I picked one little Galinas cherry tomato that never made it before the camera or onto the scale. But don't hold your breath waiting for photos of the tomatoes to come, the rest of them still pretty darned green.

Here's another first from the garden this year, Rosa Bianca eggplants. And a sort of first, the first ever August harvest of fava beans from a volunteer plant (what the damned rats left for me). Also on the tray are Green Fingers Persian cucumbers, Piracicaba broccoli, and Pimento de Padron peppers.

Green Fingers Persian cucumber is my new favorite cucumber. It's smooth skinned when young and very tasty. These are a little larger than what you might find at the store. I first tasted Persian cucumbers from Trader Joe's and knew that I had to try growing them myself.

No seediness here, even when they get larger. Aren't they beautiful. Unfortunately, the rats have developed a liking for these and I'm afraid that I'm going to have to pull the plants out now that the vermin have figured out how to get past the defences that I put up to protect the plants. Oh well, at least I can buy my second favorite cucumber, Japanese cucumbers, at the farmer's market.

I am so PO'd about the rats. I cried this weekend as I pulled out all my strawberry plants. They had to go, I wasn't getting any berries, I kept seeing all the berries disappear, even the green ones. It is time to stop feeding the rats. It doesn't seem to matter how many rats I trap (50 in 3 weeks!), they keep coming. I have to stop attracting them with easy food. The strawberry plants are in the compost, the cucumber plants will follow as soon as I can screw up the fortitude to yank out those lovely healthy productive plants. I told my husband that when the seed for his bird feeders runs out that the feeders have to go (the A No.1 spot for catching rats). Crap, it's depressing. I can't bear to think about them discovering my ripening tomatoes...

Ah well. I have so many other things to be thankful for. Gotta keep this in perspective. I surely won't starve because of the marauding vermin. Thanks for letting me vent my frustrations here.

Here's the harvests for the past week:

Piracicaba broccoli - 9.6 oz.
Capers - 1.3 oz.
Green Fingers Persian cucumbers - 2 lb., 11.3 oz. (everything large enough to harvest)
Tasty Green Japanese cucumbers - 1 lb., 7.9 oz. (ditto above)
Rosa Bianca eggplant - 1 lb., 13 oz.
Fava beans - 7.6 oz.
Pimento de Padron peppers - 5.9 oz.
Katja tomato - 6.8 oz.
Zucchini - 1 lb., 14.3 oz. (the rats haven't developed a taste for these yet)
Zucchini blossoms - 4.2 oz.

The total harvests for the week were - 9 lb., 11.9 oz.
The total harvests for the year have been - 266 lb.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see what other garden bloggers have been harvesting lately.