Springtime in the garden

Springtime in Ohio.  Gardening is on hold for the day.  Stay warm.

In defense of weeds....

So, after taking a bit of a break because of weather and family/scout stuff, I'm back.  And I'm going to jump off the edge and say nice things about my second most hated thing.  I've sworn off politics so my MOST hated thing won't enter the conversation, but I will be singing the praises of Crabgrass, Digitaria Haller.  Yep, that thing we hate almost as much as we hate the Donald.  (Ooops, sorry.)

Here's what happened.  A few years ago we built a bank along the driveway and planted some fur and blue spruce trees to provide a barrier from the road.  We also planted a row of our favorite rosa rugosa.  Everything settled in and started to grow.  The next step was to control the grass and weeds on the downhill side.  This is where my favorite thing (mulch) comes into play.  We mulched with old carpet, grass clippings, and wood chips.  That seemed to control everything except the crabgrass.  Last year I worked on pulling out crabgrass on a good portion of the hill, but I didn't get it all.  This year, late winter rain flooded the whole site, and I saw some interesting results.  Take a look.

mulch washed away from the rain

mulch and soil held in place by the extensive mat of crabgrass roots

I still hate crabgrass (almost as much as he who will not be named...) but it seems that it evolved to do a job, and it does it well.  When we rip it out we need to fill the void with something that does the same job, or it will just come back.  (There may be a political lesson here...)

Food from the garden

It was fun to pull the cover back on some of last falls greens and find yummy food still available after a long cold winter.
 

 spinach

arugula

We should be able to have fresh greens all year long, almost anywhere in the world, without much effort.

Edible Landscape Clean-up: Run for the Roses

Edible Landscaping

I don’t recall when I started to search out edible landscaping as a primary source of beauty.  It might have been when I saw how pretty my purple eggplants looked, tucked between some bushes because I did not have any more room in the REAL garden.  Or maybe it was the color of Swiss Chard under my cherry trees in the summer.  Well, for whatever reason, I am an avid edible landscaper.

I have been slowly trimming my rose bushes every other day.  They are not hard to manage but you do need to cut them back if you don’t want to live in Sleeping Beauty’s rose covered castle. Or was that Snow White and Rose Red?  Anyway, I never worry about trimming the roses too much because every bit of them are used.  In the Fall I use the rose hips for syrup.  In the Winter I give the trimmed branches to our goat, Lucy.  She eats them like candy.  The roof of her mouth must be made of titanium because these branches have thorns that really hurt.  The chickens clean up anything that Lucy drops and any spider cases, etc.

So, Lucy gets a special treat and I feel like I have cleaned up without adding anything to the landfill.  It’s a win-win.

Edible landscaping benefits not only the human critters but the birds, goats, and chickens.  Try it this year!

Oh boy, it's Okra!

Oh boy, it’s Okra!

     
         Experimenting in the garden is a family pastime.  We try to plant new things each year.  This year we planted okra.  Now, I am an Ohio girl a.k.a. a NORTHERN girl who has never tasted okra.  I did not grow up eating Cajun food, or good Southern cooking, which included okra.  I have read about how to cook it and use it, but this will be the year that I try.

       However, I am writing to you today because I think that people should start to look at okra in another way.  It is beautiful!  According to the University of Illinois Extension website the plant is from the same plant family as hibiscus, hollyhock and Rose of Sharon.  Our plants grew to be approximately three-to-four feet high. The blossoms are off-white with scarlet veins.  It is a very “showy” plant with good structure and leaves. 

       Growing okra is like having my own sculpture garden.  The finial shaped pods reach toward the sun and provide a bulky contrast to the blooms.  The branches are thick and well-spaced, allowing you to see both the blooms and the vegetables.  I have always interspersed flowers and vegetables in my gardens.  We call it edible landscaping.   Rosalind Creasy coined that term and we love it!

       As sculptural as okra is, I plan to dry it for holiday arrangements.  The pods seem to be cracking open to disperse seeds so I am trying different methods.  Some pods are outside, drying in a shaded area.  Others are inside drying away from the sunlight. The pods I put in the dehydrator on a low temperature seem to be working the best.  They have not cracked and are holding their color and shape.  Once they are dried I plan on painting them for ornaments and garlands.  Maybe that will be a holiday blog?

Learn more about growing okra  at the links below and enjoy your own edible sculpture garden!

Learn more about okra:

http://urbanext.illinois.edu/veggies/okra.cfm

http://www.goerie.com/article/20130320/LIFESTYLES04/303209991/Edible-landscaping

http://southernfood.about.com/library/weekly/aa081401a.htm

Peppers

We were over run with peppers at the end of the season.  Seems to happen every year, but this year we were prepared.  We had three new ways to process them for later use.  Out of the small spicy ones we made pickles for use on pizza and in salads.  The bulk of them (pictured above) got turned into pepper butter.  The combination of spicy and sweet makes pepper butter one of the best things I have ever had on a sandwich.  The buckets of spicy Serrano Peppers got made into fermented chili pepper sauce.  Here's how we did it.

First we gathered in all the ripe serrano peppers.  We ended up with about 12 lbs.

We washed them, trimmed away any blemishes, and pulled the stems off.   When they were cleaned and ready we loaded them into the food processor with a couple cloves of garlic and some sea salt. 






















We ground everything up, added some kefir starter, and loaded it into half gallon jars.  These we left sitting in the kitchen for a week to ferment.









After fermenting we were supposed to mash it in a sieve to get the juice.  We had a lot of fermented peppers and I didn't want to waste any of it, so we used our Squeezo instead.  It worked great.

It worked GREAT.  We ended up with about one gallon of serrano pepper sauce and a bunch of pulp.

The sauce will be bottled in smaller bottles and should last us a few months.

The pulp we dehydrated and will use as pepper flakes or we may grind it fine for powder. 






The inspiration for the fermented chili sauce came from the Nourished Kitchen blog.  If you have a lot of hot peppers you don't know what to do with, you should try this.

Tornados, tomatos, and fear, oh my!

old green house

didn't stand up to the wind

deflated... filled with water... almost collapsed...

tomatoes waiting for warm.  They weathered the wind pretty well.

Asparagus

First asparagus harvest.  Guess what we are having for dinner?

Wordless Wednesday

The Seed Order List

Finally, here is the list of most of the seeds we will be ordering for the family garden.  There will be some additions for the Market Garden, and some Herbs, Flowers (a lot), Berries, Trees, and Pasture Mix.  That should get us through spring.

Crop                         Variety           Source
Tomato - Slicing        Stupice              T
                                 Legend              T
                                 Fraziers Gem     T
Tomato - Roma         Heinz                T
                                 San Marzano    T
                                 Principe Borghese T
Tomato - Cherry       Koralile            T
Tomato - Heirloom   Tiffen Mennonite T
                                 Japanese Trifela Black T
Pepper - Bell             North Star            T
                                 Yankee Bell            J
Pepper - Sweet           Italian Pepperoncini T
                                   Yum Yum Gold T
                                  Alma Paprika     T
Pepper - Hot               Long Thin Cayenne T
                                  Early Jalapeno      T
Cucumber - Pickling    Alibi                     J
Squash - Zucchini         Plato (green)      J
                                   Soleil (yellow)     J
Squash - Winter          Tuffy (acorn)      J
                                   Blue Ballet (hubbard) J
                                  Sun Shine (kabocha) J
                                    Waltham (butternut) J
                                  Sweet Potato Beauregard J
                                  Pumpkin Racer Plus J
                                    Charisma J
Peas - Shell                       Strike J
                                   Caselode J
Peas - Snap                 Sugar Ann J
Beans - Green              Jade J
Beans - Fillet                 Maxibel J
                                    Velour J
                                    Concador J
Beans - Pole                 Fortex J
Soybean                       Tohya J
Lettuce - Leaf               Cherokee J
                                     Dancine J
                                     Breen J
                                     Australe J
                                     Concept J
                                     Magenta J
Lettuce - Romaine         Costal Star J
Spinach                         Emu J
                                    Corvair J
                                    Spargo J
                                    Tyee J
Swiss Chard                 Bright Lights J
Arugula                        Arugula J
Kale                             Ripbor J
Red                              Russian J
                                    Toscano J
Cabbage - Red               Red Express J
Cabbage - Napa              Minuet J
Pop Corn                      Miniature Colored J
                                     Robust J
                                     Early Pink T
Broccoli                        De Cicco J
Eggplant                        Hansel J
                                    Grettel J
                                    Fairy Tale J
Carrots                        Bolero J
                                   Napoli J
Onions - Yellow Storage Copra J
Onions - Red Storage Red Zeppelin J
Onions - Sweet          Gold Coin J
                                  Red Marble J
Leeks                         King Richard J
                                  Lexton J
                                  Bandit J
Shallots                      Pikant J
                                  Ambition J
Daikon                       Discovery J
                                  Miyashige J
Beets                         Red Ace J
                                  Bulls Blood J
Radicchio                   Leonardo J
                                    Fiero J
Melons - Cantaloupe  Sweet Granite J
Melons - Charentais   Savor J
Watermellon               Moon & Stars T
                                  Petite Treat T
Dried Beens Cannellini Lingot T
                                   Yin Yang T
(Looks like the formatting fell apart. Don't have time to fix it. The T is for Territorial, and the J is for Johnny Seed.)

Tomatoes

Tomatoes have been problematic for us this year.

The tomatoes in the potager have been great, but they are late ripening and there aren't a lot of them due to space.  We wanted more, so we filled the greenhouse with tomatoes this year.  Everything was looking brilliant until I messed up.  Seems like I killed about 1/3 of them. 

We grow our tomatoes pretty close together, about 18 inches apart in the row with 2 rows in a 4 foot bed.  We prune them to a single stem and train them up a string.  It works great, especially where space is at a premium (like in the greenhouse or the potager.)  Pruning and training is an ongoing thing.  I usually do it twice a week.  I snip off the suckers before they get too big, cut away any leaves that look aged or are hanging near the ground, and train the leader up the string a couple more turns.  The kids usually come at least once a week to weed while I am pruning.  Some time around the middle of July we were doing our greenhouse work, and one of the kids hit a weed they couldn't pull (we still have a weed problem... a couple more years should fix most of that.)  I reached down with my pruners and snipped the weed just below the bed surface.  We finished the work and went on with the day.  When I came in the next day to check the water this is what I found...

Within a few days these plants were either dead or wilted and weeping black gunk.  I pulled out about 1/3 of the plants, starting with the plant I'd been pruning when I clipped the weed.  I know better than to prune with dirty clippers, but that didn't stop me.  Bacterial Pith Necrosis.  Seems the bacteria was already in my soil, but only invaded the plant when I introduced it with my dirty clippers.  None of the other plants have shown any symptoms.  Lesson learned I hope.

Then we got invaded.  We leave the ends of the greenhouse open for the summer.  Keeps things cooler and lets in pollinators we want for good fruiting on tomatoes, peppers, etc.  Well it also lets in the yellow striped army worm moth, who layed her eggs all over my tomatoes and peppers.  Now I am picking buckets of the darn worms everyday, trying to save some of my tomatoes.  It isn't a pleasant battle.

You think you are getting this,

but, you end up with this.

How are  your  tomatoes doing?

I am just finishing my garden planning for the spring (I shouldn't say finishing, the details change as the plan gets implemented, but without a plan to work from it's just CHAOS.) I'm also finishing Eliot Colman's The Winter Harvest Handbook. (I like it a lot better than his earlier book The Four Season Harvest. ) It has made me think a lot about what I can do here to ensure we have fresh food year round. I have plans, BIG PLANS.




Starting this week our existing green house goes into production mode. Today will be spent cleaning and prepping. Tomorrow we plant. As you can see from the photos below, we have a bit to do.

In the greenhouse today

Outside the greenhouse

It has warmed up to 36 degrees today. The days are getting longer. We should be eating well rather than just dreaming. I know it can be done, not just from Mr. Coleman's book (he does the impossible all the time, it's a bit intimidating) but because my friends, the Adelsbergers, who live just over the hill from our farm, are doing it. Check out their cold house produce.

Frosty Monday Morning

Looks like the end of the flowers. 27 degrees F was a bit colder than I expected. Didn't cover things and now they are gone.

New life at the end of the season

Only 2 days left to get involved in the

Blogger Action Day!

GET WITH IT!

I posted my first Climate Change post at NIDN today. Check it out.

Our sunflowers put on a very nice show this year. Even on a gray, dreary day they were a spark of brilliance. We planted them along one side of the garage, near the road, and got lots of comments from folks who enjoyed them as they drove by.

Now they are finished. Sad, gray, shadows of their former glory. Time to cut them and let the birds have them. Seems a waste (at least to CC, I was all ready to cut, pull, and compost them. Fall is clean-up time for me.)

CC found inspiration where I saw chaos.

I'm amazed at the new life they have found. What a celebration at the end of the season.