Eyes on the Prize

I've taken the same attitude towards this blog as I have towards my garden in recent weeks: I want to do more than I have time for, so I'll just put it off until all of our trips are over.

I have some downtime tonight, however, so here's a little update. We literally have travelled every other weekend, so in the off weekends when we are home, we've spent time with friends. I wrote about the day I spend making lasagna. Since then, I've tried to add to my freezer stash by doubling batches of dinner and putting up garden harvests as they come in.

So far I've made up the lasagnas, soups, sauce, meatballs, chicken pot pie, and pizza doughs. Is there anything more comforting than a freezer full of ready-to-cook food?

Recently I dug up half of the potatoes and mashed them for the freezer:

It was my first time trying this, and I froze them in muffin tins before sealing them with my FoodSaver. I see a future filled with pork chops, mashed taters, and rotating fresh veg from the garden. Come ON tomatoes!

The other half of the potatoes I'll mash and use in several batches of shepherd's pie, along with a few of our TONS of onions and these:

Bill and I pulled these up last night, and again, I have to admit, MUCH better than last year's yield. I haven't been keeping track well, but we've already harvested enough carrots to use fresh for a few dinner and make up a couple of chicken pot pies. I'm not really a fan of canned carrots, so I'm trying to cook and freeze them in meals as much as possible. I think I have enough for 4 or 5 shepherd's pies and a few more quarts of chicken soup. Surprisingly, the swiss chard stems worked really well in the soup, so I will definitely be using them again--especially since they're still growing!

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.

My Quads are Burning

Yes, that is a play on words which include both my aching legs and the re-energized garden quads. So, it should be no big surprise that I didn't accomplish everything on my list from last week, though I did get some of it done. It turns out that last week was even busier than I thought it would be, because of extra work and no babysitter.

However, we did make progress. First of all, Quad 2 is finally planted out. This what it looks like on paper:

I updated the spreadsheet with the fact that there is a potato wasteland at the end of one of the rows because the trench got flooded out and the taters died. We have since filled it in and I'm debating what will fill the space. This is what the quad actually looks like now:

Right to Left: Row 1: Broccoli/Onions/Radish/Swiss Chard. Row 2: Cauliflower/Radish/Potatoes/Beans. Row 3: Potatoes/Beans. Row 4: Corn.

I'll have to replant cauliflower in the fall because several of my seedlings have been eaten. We planted corn this weekend, and I'm not getting my hopes up because Oklahoma is tough on corn. If we harvest enough for 1 late summer meal, I'll be happy, even though I planted 16 rows of 5-6 seeds each.

Bill did the hard work of filling dirt in the potato trenches, and I planted green beans in a single row down the middle:

I actually found one sprouting just 24 hours after planting. I take that as a positive omen. I'm also please that some of the taters are blooming, which means we're getting ever closer to eating potatoes:

We're already enjoying the Swiss Chard, which was an experiment this year as I'd never cooked with it before. So far we've eaten it in salads, roasted with pork chops, and sauteed with spinach and garlic.

Quad 3 is a little over halfway planted, but it needs some work.

As you can see, there are a few rows in the middle that need to be planted. From left to right are 2 rows of peppers, nothing, a row of garlic, and 2 rows of tomatoes. There are herbs growing throughout and 4 eggplants in with the peppers.

The peppers seem to be doing well, but I can't say the same for the tomatoes. I did a poor job of hardening off the seedlings, and some of them succumbed to weather/pests. I'm going to pick up some replacement plants this week to fill empty spots. In the middle of Quad 3 will go okra, zucchini, yellow squash, and if there is room, purple hull peas. All of these things are normally planted later, which is why I've been lazy about getting them in.

Quad 4 presented a design challenge that I have finally worked out. This is where my winter squashes and remaining legumes are supposed to go, but I wasn't sure how I could lay out the space with enough room for the vining squashes to spread out while keeping them somewhat separated from each other in case we have another squash bug attack this year. What I came up with was alternating squash hills with bean sections.

It's kind of hard to see the mounds in this picture, but the beans are in the darker blocks and the squash mounds are in between. Each row will alternate so that the mounds will be little islands in the beans, and hopefully the beans will act as a barrier for squashbugs. Time will tell. I haven't finished prepping this quad because I ran out of bagged compost, but the blocks above are planted with beans.

Quad 1 is doing really well, and its success is keeping me sustained as I work through the other quads. Look how lush:

Okay, admittedly this picture is a little misleading because a lot of the green is weeds and grass. But the lettuces and spinach are doing very well, and I may be able to start freezing some spinach for later in the summer soon.

Carrots are coming up all over the place, and we probably could start digging up some to see if they are ready. The peas and snow peas blossomed late last week, so there are pods shooting out here and there. Tomorrow we will eat our first harvest of snow peas for dinner.

So there you have it. There is still a lot of work and planting left to be done, and I hope that I'm not too late.

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.

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!