Gardening: Potato Harvest

Little Miss Farmer
Helping the Potatoes Out of the Barrell

My previous post about growing potatoes was almost prophetic. The statement, "We don't exactly have huge potato crops each year," turned out to be a huge understatement when it came to the 2011 crop:

Yup. That's all of them.

We had a very rainy summer this year, and many of our plants suffered. One potato barrel yeilded only one small potato. The other gave the sad bowl of tubers seen above. It is barely enough for a single meal for the four of us. We may not even bother with them next year. I am considering repurposing those barrels and using them for flowers instead.

Gardening: Final Tomato Harvest

Hurricane Irene passed by on Saturday, August 27, 2011. We are far enough inland and high enough in elevation that we had next to no damage, and the brief  3-hour power outage was a non-event, since we have a whole-house, standby generator to keep things running. The following week through the Labor Day weekend, however, was one of non-stop rain. The nearby creek flooded repeatedly. The opening of school was delayed by two days. Our Labor Day picnic was held under the gazebo in the downpour as we shivered and enjoyed good company and some of the best roast pork ever. My poor tomatoes, however, drowned.

It has been a pretty good tomato summer for us. The Lemon Boys came in first, then the red tomatoes came in. We had a tomato or two on hand at all times for several weeks- perfect for snacking and salads. When the sun finally came out the weekend after Labor Day, however, the plants were black, shriveled, and sagging.

It is hard to believe that our vegetable garden went from this...

May 2011

To this...

July 2011

To this...

September 2011
(How Sad!)

... in just a few months. Where did the summer go?

Gardening: Cool Cucumber Trellis

I love cucumbers! My favorite is to peel them, slice them, and put them in a bowl overnight with onions and a LOT of salt. In the morning they are a great cool snack. Tasty! This year we wanted to get our cucumbers more sun, so we got them away from the house and put them at the front of the herb garden bed. Our next door neighbor was building free-form trellises with thin bamboo poles, and Mr. Farmer decided to follow suit.

The trellis looks a lot like a tent frame. A center support is held vertical by triangular sideways supports. Mr. Farmer hung some twine from the frame to get the cucumbers climbing without adding more poles.

The Trellis (May 2011)

Admittedly, we are several weeks behind our contemporaries at the base of the mountain as far as the growing season goes. That means that my co-workers who garden are up to their eyeballs in cucumbers already. I have only had two come ready so far, and one more is about ready to go in a few days. There are many more, however, that are an inch long and showing great promise. So tell me, do you think it is working?

The Trellis (July 2011)

Thrift: Freezing Sweet Bell Peppers

Did you know that bell peppers freeze very well? That time of year will be upon us soon, and I absolutely hate waste. This time the sweet peppers came from the local grocery store. They were past their peak (definition: half of them had actual mold on them), and the pigs didn't seem to care for them. So, I sorted through them, pulled out the ones that were in better shape, and prepared them for storage.

First I washed them whole and removed the stickers. Then I took off the tops and removed the seeds. I cut them all into tiny dices and mixed them together in a big bowl. Then I rinsed them again one last time and let them sit in the fridge for a few minutes in the colander to drain. I bagged them up in zipper bags and stacked them in the freezer. A couple of the bags I mixed chopped onion with the peppers.

Admittedly peppers do lose some of their snap when frozen, but they still work well in a lot of recipes. Bang the bag against the counter a few times and they break right up, making measuring easy, right from the freezer! Toss them, still frozen, with your warm pasta to help cool it quicker for macaroni or pasta salad (you didn't really think I only had one method for speed-cooling pasta, did you?). Toss them into your spaghetti sauce. Add them to your homemade salsa. Fry them up with sausage and serve over pasta.

Sausage, Peppers, and Onions

Whether your garden is overproducing, your animals are being picky eaters, or your brother-in-law scored yet another just-before-closing deal at the flea market, don't throw out those peppers! Freeze them!

Gardening: Early Harvest

Ah, the first fruits of our Spring labor! There's something about those first couple garden items that keep the hope going into summer. I mean, the fun part of the gardening is done. The dirt and mulch have been hauled. The rows have been cut in. The garden has been planned, laid out, and watered. Now, all that's left is weeding and protecting against bugs and critters. What fun would that be if not for:

The First Radish

AND....

An Almost Unending Supply of Fresh Herbs for Cooking

AND

Hope for the Future
(Garlic)

Admittedly, I do look forward to an August of being up to my eyeballs in tomatoes and green peppers. Making pickles and cucumber salad will be so wonderful when the time comes. But for now, I am happy with the herbs. I am overjoyed with the 2 small green peppers and 2 tiny heads of garlic. I am very pleased, most of all, with the huge bunch of garlic sets above - 2 years in the making -  that prove that I can grow garlic in my garden; I just need some patience. I'm excited about putting my many rows of garlic into the ground in October and perhaps being independent of the grocery store for garlic next summer. I can't wait!

Gardening: Potatoes

Live Christmas trees are a family tradition for both sides of our family. What does that have to do with potatoes? Stay with me on this one; I'm getting to that. Most years we go cut our own tree, or pick a live one already cut for the living room. Just a few years back, we were convinced by a friend (and our first pig-partner) to purchase a balled tree from a charity he was working with. The price was fair, and since our area was more deciduous forest, we thought a little evergreen nearby would be nice. So we bought the tree, and we bought a wooden barrel that had been cut in half to hold (and hide) the root ball while it was in the house. The effect was very handsome... but what to do with the barrel once Christmas was over?

Ever since then, we have been growing potatoes in wooden barrels. They are attractive and convenient. Each Christmas dinner we put aside a few potatoes or sweet potatoes in paper bags on a shelf in the kitchen. When spring arrives, we remix the soil in the barrels, add the already-sprouted potatoes, and watch them grow all summer. At the end of the season, we just dump out the barrel onto a tarp, pick out the potatoes, and put the dirt back in until the next year.

We don't exactly have huge potato crops each year, but the cost is almost nothing, and potato plants are gorgeous to look at. They have extremely dark green leaves, and when they flower, the flowers are bright yellow. It is a very nice contrast, and the rugged-looking barrels are a great ornament. I would probably grow potatoes even if they didn't result in anything edible!

Aren't They Pretty? And they're not even full grown yet!

Gardening: "My Garden" - Part Five, Vegetable Garden 2011

It is fitting that I end the "My Garden" series with the garden that always has been, and perhaps always will be, a pure gift of a garden: the vegetable garden. I am a complete novice at planting veggies, in spite of being around vegetable gardens my whole life. My brown thumb comes shining through when it comes to tomatoes and peppers, so Mr. Farmer handles the whole thing almost exclusively each year. The vegetable garden is "mine" because he gives it to me.

As I mentioned, my brother-in-law gave me the wonderful, if premature, gift of tomato and pepper plants this year. They were so beautiful that we just had to be sure they got into the ground on time. The weather was less than cooperative, so we ended up bringing the plants inside one night while Mr. Farmer and the children prepared the bed. Young Master Farmer brought many loads of good soil to add to the existing bed, and Mr. Farmer turned it over. When all was ready, he planted 8 tomato plants and 6 sweet pepper plants. It is my understanding that some of the tomatoes are Roma (plum) tomatoes, and that one tomato plant should bear yellow fruit!

We are going all out with the tomatoes and peppers this year. We traded the extra plants for some cucumber plants from the next-door neighbor, but we planted the cucumbers in the herb garden to give the tomatoes the best possible chance. Mr. Farmer even plans a series of stakes, connected by strings, for the plants to grow on. I am still a little unclear on how that is going to be set up, but I promise I will share as soon as it is set up!

Isn't it Beautiful?

Conclusion:

I decided to write the entire "My Garden" series before publishing any of it. I usually ask Mr. Farmer and the children not to look over my shoulder while I type because it distracts me. And while I may ask him questions about this and that (and when he asks why, I respond simply, "It's for the blog,") he generally does not see my posts until after I post them. Imagine my surprise, then, when I heard him tell one of the children to "bring a load of soil for your mother's garden" through the phone while I was at work one evening during the process of writing this series. I thought I heard a smile in his voice when he said it. I thought that maybe somehow he knew. But did he?

Gardening: Tomatoes and Peppers... on the first of MAY?!?!?!

My enabling brother-in-law is up to his tricks again. The call came today that he had bought me a flat of various tomatoes and sweet bell peppers. Mr. Farmer went and picked them up, assuming that we would keep them inside for a few weeks before planting them, just to make sure the weather would be warm enough. There are medium and large tomatoes and sweet cherry tomatoes. There are green bell peppers and yellow sweet peppers. All the plants are at least 10 inches tall, and most of them have flowers on them already!

The size and progress of these plants completely throws off my gardening schedule. My nice, leisurely plan for May was to complete the herb garden, then plant the annuals, then prepare and plant the veggie garden - all over the next 3-4 weeks. Instead, faced with a week of rain nearly every day, I must prepare the vegetable bed immediately. These plants are tall and straight and healthy, but they are surely root bound and need room to set down good roots soon if there is any hope of them ever holding their own weight. 

The vegetable garden needs a lot of work. It is too shallow. The wall needs another course of stone. The soil is compacted and depleted from last year's tomatoes. There are small toys and cigarette butts under the layer of dry, fallen leaves. It is so large that I will probably need to add 4 wheelbarrow loads of manure-soil to fill it up. It is going to take some time.

So, on the first of May, after already completing the hosta garden and planting the new Greek oregano, I started jumping on the shovel and turning up the vegetable garden. Let's just hope my exhaustion turns to delight by the end of the season.

Gardening: Tomato Frustration

It's September, and the beefsteak tomatoes are still green. I don't mean that some of them are green, or that the 2nd set is green, I mean they are ALL GREEN. I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's begin at the beginning.

Back in late May we planted 5 tomato plants. 3 were called "Sweet Baby" cherry tomatoes. The other two were "Mountain Harvest" and "Beefsteak" respectively. We didn't want to overdo it with too many plants. Last year, after all, was a horrific failure. What few tomatoes did emerge were quickly taken over by a blight, and we did not get to eat a single one. So naturally, we did not expect too much this year. We were wrong.

In early June we found a tomato plant, growing strong back where the pig pen used to be. This volunteer plant looked so nice and healthy that we decided to plant it in the last spot with the big tomatoes. After all, the bush beans had failed miserably in that spot, so what did we have to lose? The space was probably wasted one way or the other.

The early signs were not great. The tomato plants were tall and spindly with few leaves. So, as soon as the first flowers appeared, Mr. Farmer cut all the tops off just above the flowers. I really thought they were going to die. Instead they stalled- then bushed out! Two rows of flowers turned into four and eight and more! Before we knew it, we were up to our eyeballs in cherry tomatoes- at least we would have been if the tomato plants weren't right next to the front door where all who entered or exited could see them and be tempted by their beautiful bright red color.

Soon after the first cherry tomatoes reddened, the first large tomatoes bloomed. Little tomatoes became big tomatoes and... that's it. They just stopped growing. Hard, full size tomatoes sat on the vine and did nothing as weeks became months. A handful of cherry tomatoes were enjoyed each day along with the thought, "Maybe tomorrow the big ones will turn red." Neighbors and co-workers gave gifts of big, overripe tomato excess from their gardens, and yet ours stayed green.

On the 13th of September, the hail came. A slight blush had finally graced ONE of the large tomatoes and hopes were high. But in the early evening, a furious storm came through, pounding with pea-sized hail and equally large raindrops. The garden looked like it had seen the first fall snow. The only difference was that the white ice was only on the ground, not on the leaves of the plants. We figured our tomatoes were done for.

Much of the foliage on the tomato plants died off, but the large tomatoes remained, and the cherry tomatoes continued to redden. The herb garden wasn't so lucky:

My Poor Parsley- Beaten Flat and Frozen- Perhaps Dead



Our Beautiful Basil- Now Perforated from the Hail

Even My Seemingly Indestructible Chives Succumbed

We removed as much of the hail as possible as quickly as possible, and the work paid off. But the large tomatoes are still green. They are dented, but they are still rock hard and dark green. I wonder if we will be able to eat any of them before the first frost hits???

*****LATE SEPTEMBER UPDATE!!*****

They're red! Finally! As of September 27, we have SIX red tomatoes, and several more are beginning to blush. We might be able to eat them all before the leaves are off the trees and the first snow falls after all!