Bring It On Summer (Part 1)

In order to make up for my lack of blogging, I've come up with a 2-part post (maybe more) to catch you up on the garden activities of late.

Part 1 is about our recent harvests. We've steadily been picking snow peas and shelling peas for just about a month. Snow peas have petered out and shelling peas probably only have 1 more small picking session left. Want to see how we've done this year?

We started picking peas every night before dinner (recall this post) and Bill and I would shell or destring as necessary, blanch, and tray freeze batches of them after Joe went to bed.

Now to compare, last year we harvested exactly these many shelling peas from the garden:

That is approximately HALF of 1/2 cup of peas. Yes, 1/4 cup of peas. Barely a Joe-sized fistful.

We did a little better this year:

Two full gallons, and we're not quite finished yet, though the 100+ temps have mostly halted pea production for good. Now, considering how fast we go through peas--the one vegetable Joe will ALWAYS eat--this will probably last us maybe a month, if I'm lucky. But it still feels nice to have homegrown veggies in the freezer. And speaking of freezer...

This, my friends, is an entire freezer shelf full of snow peas, packaged by the pound and quarter-pound. We hauled in a grand total of 9lbs of snow peas from ONE 25-foot row. This doesn't include what we ate fresh from the garden, either. I think if we had done another row and hadn't gone on vacation in the middle of the harvest, we might have been able to freeze enough to last until winter. Crazy.

While we're in the freezer, might as well show you the first of the carrot harvest:

Just a pint-sized bag of carrot coins, but more than we got last year by a long shot. There are still tons of carrots out in the garden waiting to be picked, but this is what we got while thinning them out.

Next up are taters & onions:

Not a lot of potatoes, considering I dug up 6 plants to get these. The plants were nowhere near mature, but we're in the midst of a full-on war with the potato beetles, and it was either dig or nothing. These I'll mash up and throw on top of a shepherd's pie this weekend.

The onions above are much more exciting. These represent a tiny fraction of what is still waiting out in the garden, and they are nice, large bulbs. Some I will cure and store in the root cellar/storm shelter and some I will chop up and freeze.

All of this is a fairly upbeat and optimistic view of what's going on out there, but trust me, the whole picture ain't pretty. I've mentioned the extreme heat and vacation; both of these resulted in almost all of my flowers dying, hot-weather weeds dominating the garden, and no more lettuce. Those pics are to come in the next part.

We've Been Busy

There are a LOT of peas out there to eat right now.

Pod People

Our first big harvest of snow peas. I've used a few in a stir fry and salad, but these were blanched and frozen for stir-frys of the future!

We're also starting to get a few shelling peas.

So far these pods are nice and long with lots of peas in each.

Garden Update: First Harvest

Things are going really well in the garden so far. I keep telling myself that this time last year, we only had seeds and seedlings in the ground for 2 weeks, but this year we have this:

Thriving peas, lettuce for days, spinach, and lots of onions and carrots. And this is just the first quad! I'm so excited.

This is one of three varieties of lettuce growing, and it's so tasty! I should note that while I direct-seeded a lot of this lettuce, a good amount of it also came from my wintersown milk jugs. It all transplanted beautifully, so I will definitely be sowing again next winter. We also have some potato action:

It's super muddy out there right now from our weekend rain. I'm hoping the potatoes at the end of these rows make it, but they are currently completely submerged in water, so we'll see.

Anyway, our first harvest was last Thursday morning. For some reason (ahem, caffiene still in my system) I was up at 5am and so I headed outside as soon as the the sun came up. I meant to only thin out the lettuce, but this was the haul of my thinnings:

Yes, those are 3 radishes, too. We've harvested 6 of them already. The first three went to the bunnies because I didn't know what to do with them. I have since learned that they pair perfectly with cilantro, meat, tomatoes, green onions, and cheese for tacos. There are no pictures of this because we inhaled them in seconds. I did manage to snap my first salad, though:

This is my version of a Cobb salad with a hard boiled egg, chopped ham, a sprinkle of cheese and walnuts and some homemade honey-mustard vinaigrette. Definitely not a low-cal diet salad, but for sure healthier than a restaurant version. Mmmmmm.

Freezer!

Behold the awesome!

This, my friends, marks a new day in my kitchen, even though it is technically in the garage. All of the baking, meal assembling, and baby food making that I do can now actually be preserved long term! Probably the greatest Black Friday purchase we could have made.

Marvel in the energy-starryness of it all! I no longer need to worry about stuffing everything we harvest into an already crammed side-by-side freezer (hate!).

I haven't even had time to pull the tape off of it or set up the lovely shelves (so many!) into the door, but I had to christen it with what will be our Christmas dinner in a few weeks:

Bask in the 20 cubic feet of glorious zero-degree air! That is a giant pork loin, friends. Look at it just languishing in there like a teenager in a rented prom limo. No longer are you forcing me to rearrange every thing in the door of my crummy tiny freezer every time I try to close it!

I don't usually get this excited about appliances, but I'm a little jazzed about this one.

Surprise Harvest

What do you get when you plant something during the wrong season, wait six months, and forget about them completely? You get this:

Yep, that is an actual cauliflower head peeking through. This cold-weather veg is meant to be planted in late winter or early fall in these parts, but we planted 3 of them in mid-spring. They didn't die during the summer heat, but they didn't do anything else, either. In the last month, they've taken off and when I went to visit them this morning, they were ready to harvest.

Aren't they pretty? I had no clue what to expect from these lovelies, but to give you a sense of scale, here they are next to a full-sized apple:

Pretty big. I broke them apart, blanched them and filled up a 1 gallon-sized+1 quart-sized freezer bags with them. I think I'll save the gallon for Christmas dinner (nothing like bragging about serving homegrown veggies in the dead of winter, right?). This surprise harvest has really encouraged me to try more cauliflower and broccoli in the spring (ahem, EARLY spring) and again next fall.

I am also fairly amazed by my die-hard pepper plants. They just won't quit. This is only part of what was growing out there today; I left several peppers on the plants to get bigger.

These will get chopped and tossed into the freezer.

My cherry tomatoes have also made a bit of a comeback as well. I think the Indian summer we're experiencing is to blame for the extra long tomato season:

I'm growing these in a large Tomato Tree (the kind where the plants grow out the side, not the bottom) but they're going in the ground next year. The tomato plants were more leggy and tall than they were productive, and these are actually the most fruits I've seen on this plant at one time the whole season.

Live and learn, and then harvest.

2009 Harvest

Some pictures from this year's harvest, however tiny.

We ended up not eating these 2 eggplants, the first of about 5 that we harvested, because they went past their prime while we were on vacation. The plant was fairly hardy, and I think if we pay closer attention next year, we can expect a better eggplant production.

We tried planting potatoes in "potato bags" that I bought from Gardeners.com. The theory behind these bags is to fill them halfway with dirt and seed potatoes, then fill in dirt as the plants grow upwards. We ended up with pretty small taters and VERY leggy plants. We're going to go ahead and stick these guys in the ground next time.
One happy success this year was our peppers. We planted green, red, and yellows, and they didn't really take off until the end of September. Every time we harvest some of these little guys, the next group gets bigger. I've been chopping them up and freezing them to throw onto pizzas and into sautes.

Ah, the zucchinis. Has anyone ever NOT had success with zucchinis? We ate these guys in several different forms--pastas, breads, baked, soups--pretty consistently for 3 weeks or so in August. They went from tiny baby squashies to mammouth monsters seemingly overnight (documented by our lovely neighbor, One Acre Homestead here). Then, due to negligence on our part to nip them in the bud, we waged an epic war with squash bugs.

The cantaloupe vines we planted from seed had great potential and pretty much took over an entire bed by themselves. We might try trellising them next year. Something was wrong with the timing of these, though, because although the vines set out several good-sized fruits, we only managed to harvest 2 of them at the right time. The rest quickly rotted on the vine, even though they didn't look fully ripe yet.

The carrots were pretty disappointing all around. Most were woody and/or too small to do anything other than be thrown into the compost pile. A wise neighbor suggested that she planted her carrots according to the lunar cycle and had success, so we will be doing this next year.
I like to call these pole beans "tease beans." In late June we harvested a small handful of what seemed to be a promising crop. For the next 4 months, however.....nothing. These plants were setting several blooms, but no beans. Something about the coolers temps in September got the plants moving again, and now there are big beans all over the place. We decided not to harvest these, though, and will instead till them back into the soil as green manure. Bush beans next year.