A Rainbow of Possibilities

I feel like every post I write these days starts off with "things are really crazy right now," but they are. We are smack dab in the middle of lots of summer travels, which means that my days are filled with trying to catch up with/get ahead of work so I can enjoy our trips with nothing hanging over my head. This, of course, means that the garden is chock full of weeds, the flowers are dead, and if I'm not careful, we'll be eating a lot of short-cut foods.

So this weekend I decided to get ahead of the game and make a bunch of freezer dinners that I can just pull out and warm up and not feel guilty about what I'm feeding my family. I made 18.5 quarts of "the sauce", complete with enough meatballs and sausage for at least 6 dinners. It felt really good to use homegrown onions. We have a bunch of Swiss chard in the garden that is standing up very well to the sweltering heat, so we picked a bunch of it and used it in 2 different dishes for the freezer.

For those who are unfamiliar with chard (as I was before I planted it), it is a green with a yummy buttery flavor and the highest vitamin A content of any vegetable on the planet. We've had it sauteed with a touch of butter and I've been able to freeze some of it for later. It works well in place of spinach, which is what I did in the first dish:

I made 4 lasagnas with whole wheat pasta, organic lamb sausage, homemade sauce, local cheeses, and swiss chard leaves. I probably could have made 5, but I kept tasting the flavor combos to make sure they worked...and...well...they did.

The firm, brightly colored stems leftover after the lasagnas took the place of celery in some homemade chicken noodle soup:

I chopped these down, added stock, homegrown carrots, onions, fresh herbs, and whole wheat egg noodles. The result was a hearty, low-calorie, SUPER vitamin-packed soup:

I'll definitely be eating this to mitigate the effects of eating an entire pan of lasagna by myself.

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.

Quad 2: Only Time Will Tell

Last week we tilled up the rows for Quad 2 in our four-quad garden scheme. We've only planted out some of it, but this is what the plan is:

The rows are 4 feet across in this quad, instead of 3 feet like Quad 1. We did that because it's a bit of a balancing act to walk between the 3-foot rows, and because there is a bunch of interplanting going on here. Not included in this plant is the fact that at the last minute we cut the last 4 feet from the Swiss Chard area to plant some leftover potatoes in a square trench. We'll let them grow close together so we can harvest small new potatoes while waiting for the others to mature. Here's how it looks on the ground:

See the difference? We lose some planting space, but gain some breathing room to move in between. I'm not convinced I'll keep it this way for the rest of the quads, but we'll see.

As for the actual planting activities, there are currently potatoes, onions and swiss chard in the ground. This is a shot of us digging trenches for the potatoes:

And then a few short days later, the square trench looked more like an in-ground pool:

Gotta love torrential spring rains. Let's just hope the seed potatoes didn't rot in the ground, though I'm not going to keep my hopes up about this little experiment.

Quad 1 Update

Our plans for Quad 1 changed slightly, but not as much as I thought they would. The original layout included 4 rows of peas, which stayed, and a row each of lettuces and spinach. We cut the lettuce row short and planted onions at the end:

It turns out that I might have more onion sets than I could ever hope to plant. I've planted out another 2 rows in Quad 2 and will probably add some to Quad 3, though I don't know if that will be pushing it in terms of proper planting times for these.

It's nice to know that we will eventually be eating snow peas:

This row is chock full of sprouting Oregon Snow Pod 2 plants. I just hope that they truely do have a bush habit, instead of vining, so we don't have to put up a trellis for this row since we'll be building 3 other trellises. I think they are doing so well because a) the temperatures have been perfect for pea-growing and b) we used Joe food to fertilize them:

I really don't know how this cheerio got all the way out there by the peas, but there it was. Cheerios appear in the most RANDOM places here at the WatRanch.

Other Quad 1 news is that we will soon be attempting to transplant the lettuces that we sowed in milk jugs. I'm not seeing a lot of germination in the planted rows, so it's reassuring that the wintersown seeds are doing so well:

These are the "Flame" seedlings that will grow into pretty red leaves. I can't wait for the first salad!

In Like a Lamb...

The last two days have been LOVELY outside. Low 60s, brilliant sunshine, brisk breeze. I'm trying to hover over the peas/spinach/lettuce that have already been planted, so I have been making myself busy in other areas of the garden. The weather has coordinated nicely with Joe taking an extra nap in the afternoons due to teething, so I'm taking it as a Universe signal that I need to play outside. Here's what I've been up to:

 

Today I planted onions (above), carrots, radishes, lettuce, and spinach in Quad 1. The carrots and radishes went in along the edges of rows of peas. We'll see how that goes. I still have LOTS of onion bulbs and carrots to plant, so we'll see where those get fit in. 

I checked in on the wintersown broccoli and lettuces in the milk jugs:

Cute, right? The broccoli is throwing out true leaves nicely, so hopefully they will be ready for transplanting in another week or two. Just like everything else, I think they were slowed down by the ice storm, and I'm hoping the weather stays mild enough for us to get a harvest from them. If not, we'll just leave them in until fall.

I am optimistic about the cauliflower seedlings that I started inside. I'm starting to harden off the biggest ones outside.

 

They looked so cheerful hanging out on the back porch, soaking in the rays. I hope the other 5 will be ready to join them by next week. Tomorrow is supposed to be another lovely day, so I tilled up Quad 2 this evening to get ready to plant potatoes.

 

 

Here is all 16lbs cut into pieces and drying on the kitchen table. I wonder how long it will take for me to get my kitchen table back...

Taters & Onions

Even though the ground outside right now is practically impossible to even walk on because of the mud, I'm still plowing forward (get it...) with gardening plans. Today I "wintersowed" two spinach varieties and planted a flat of 3 kinds of herbs--lavender, cinnamon basil, and oregano--to join the other stuff growing in my makeshift sunroom, aka the kitchen table.

This past weekend we took a trip to our local farm supply store to check out the seed potatoes and onion sets. This is a dangerous time of year for me because it's hard to be around seeds and plants and not want to bring them home, regardless of the price or current weather conditions.

In all, we ended up with almost 16lbs of seed potatoes. The varieties I chose were Yukon Gold, Red LaSoda, Kennebec White, All Blue, and a few Norland Reds.

 

I'm keeping them in an old apple crate in the garage. There is another layer of potatoes under this one--at this point in the planting game I have no idea how much is too much or too little. I know what we've planned on paper, but it's hard to tell if we are vastly overcompensating for our ridiculously small yields last year (due to not planting enough). I do know that in this family, some roasted potatoes, onions, summer squash, and a little bit of meat go a long way in the summer dinner department. Which is why I may have gone overboard in the onion department, too:

I've never planted onions of any variety before, and although my research tells me that we should be planting intermediate-to-short day varieties in our area, I couldn't determine what varieties were being sold at the farm store. So, I just purchased and hoped for the best. 220 bulbs ought to do it, right? Plus 12 experimental shallot bulbs...the chef wannabe in me couldn't resist grabbing these. Now if only the ground would dry out a bit so I can get cracking!