What's growing?

It's already summer and I've not done a garden post in a while. In fact, I can't remember when I last did one, but, then again, I can't remember what my kids birth dates are either sometimes.

So, here are some random photos of the garden.

lots of garlic (right) and onions (left) with tree nursery in front

kale in the foreground

alpine strawberries that some people claim are full of flavor, but I think they mealy

various lettuces

trying out a special weed cover made from paper

banana peppers

eggplant in the greenhouse

nopal (that we hope will grow big enough to eat one day)

Asian pears in the orchard

black raspberries

These photos were taken over a couple of weeks of end of spring and beginning of summer, so there's a mix of spring and summer veggies.


And finally, because I've preempted "My Favorite Scene" today, I feel like I should at least have a video, so here's one of the guys and the chickens:

So, how about you? How does your garden grow?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Fall harvests

This post is dedicated to my mom who passed away on Oct. 23 of 2010. She loved gardening and was always hugely enthusiastic about hubby's gardening endeavors. I think I have a photo of her, when she visited us one year, helping to pick hickory nuts meat out of the hickory trees that grow on our property. It's very cute. If I find it, I'll post it next time.

-------

So it's officially autumn and we've had two frosts. But, thanks to floating row covers, we still have a good bit of veggies to harvest.

Yesterday, hubby picked the following goodies: from back to front - choi sum, green onions, celery, and dill.

We froze the choi sum for later, but hubby put the other three things into salmon cakes (it was what's for dinner!).

He also harvested salad makings: spinach, leaf lettuce, and bib lettuce. Here they are all shredded up in the spinner.

I love still being to eat from our own garden this time of year!

Are you harvesting anything tasty from your garden? If you are, tell me what you're growing. If not, I encourage you to grow a fall garden next year.

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

The seedlings are up

This past week, I decided to re-enact the famous Edvard Munch's The Scream. I'm sure some of you can commiserate. Not only do I not have enough time to get everything done, but the *&^% satellite internet provider has put us on bandwidth curfew again. So I apologize for not getting around to reading your various blogs but there's no arguing with our malevolent bandwidth overlord.

Hubby has started the seedlings indoors. There are celery, broccoli, lettuce, cabbage, tomatillos, tomatoes, peppers, onions, and frisee.

The onions are pretty distinctive, being long and grassy:

Outside the strawberries are blooming! I'm excited. We only have 2 beds, but I hope they both do well.

What have you got started? Trying anything new this year?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Autumn gardening

How did we commemorate the beginning of October? By gardening, of course!

If you're not out there weeding and planting and tending this time of year, you won't have a nice fall/winter crop to harvest. You don't need a fancy greenhouse either, just some row-covers if you plant cold-hardy crops. If you want to go the fancy greenhouse route, check out Eliot Coleman's books to learn more.

Here are the kids, weeding (before harvesting tomatoes and peppers); no, they don't always have goofy grins while weeding, but they don't complain about having to do it either:

So what are we weeding and tending to? Well, there's choi sum:

and lettuce:

and carrots:

and don't forget the cabbage (although that was planted a while ago) :

Another nice fall crop is kale. It's highly cold tolerant.  Hubby grew 2 different varieties this year:

We're also harvesting some end-of-summer crops like potatoes (no pic, sorry) and sweet potatoes:

Sweet potatoes as big as footballs (with the density of bowling balls) -

Here's a more mature choi-sum that hubby's been harvesting already:

Hubby re-planted some summer squash after vine borers killed our squash plants earlier this summer.  We've been getting a really nice harvest from them.  Both the patty-pans:

and the summer squash:

Because we needed room for the new plantings, hubby pulled out a bunch of volunteer dill plants and I hung them up to dry.  Who needs Halloween decorations when you have these?

I hope you're running a nice Autumn garden yourself!  Next up: tomato pie recipes.

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

How does our garden grow?

Before I get into blathering about our garden, I want to give a shout-out to Product Body's fantastic Giveaway! Head over to The Soap Bar blog to find out how to enter; Joanna's products are incredible! You can thank me later.  ;)

Thinking about the nursery rhyme leads me to suspect that Mary wasn't the one being contrary; it was probably the garden pests who were contrary!  (Unless, of course, you take it as the political allegory that it is and from the view point of Elizabeth I, Mary was rather contrary; but I hate talking politics.)

All sorts of things conspire to make your garden a failure: rabbits, voles, aphids, caterpillars, chipmunks, and, yes, even birds.  They blithely nibble on your plants and berries, snipping off and killing young shoots before they have a chance to realize their dreams of becoming a full-blown plant.  The garden is a sad, rough place to raise a seedling.

Still, we persist, year after year.  Or hubby persists, and the kids and I help to nurse his eternal optimism.

So to answer "how does our garden grow", I thought I'd show some photos of the progress.  I think I took these photos Tuesday morning (June 7th).  These are by no means all of our garden beds.  Some are still empty (well, maybe just one or two are), and some I just didn't take close-ups of (example, cucumbers, squash, grapes).

A sweeping view of the south garden, outside of the main fenced garden. Our dilapidated chicken tractor is at the left-hand side. Hubby fixed it now though, so I'll have to show a photo of his handiwork some other time.

Looking inside our main fenced garden...it's hard to take in all 27 beds in there at once:

The bib lettuce, co-existing with the frisee:

The lettuce, nearly bolting, with some beets in the foreground, not quite big enough yet. Interspersed are dill that keep self-seeding in our garden.

Speaking of self-seeding, here's a volunteer lamb's quarters:

The cabbages are doing beautifully...

In fact, dh used one for cole slaw:

...but the broccoli is just getting started:

One day soon, we'll get some peas:

More frisee, cohabiting with the celery this time:

The asparagus are still going strong, amazingly:

as are our garlic, which won't be ready for harvest for another month:

Our strawberries are pretty much done:

But other things are just getting started, such as eggplants:

and sweet potatoes:

Regular potatoes:

Lima beans:

Peppers:

Tomatoes:

And green onions - front - (this is the half bed inside the main garden, and not the six beds outside the fenced area) and basil - back:

Dh made some yummy meals again. This was a faux gyros with brown rice instead of pita, and our tomato sauce instead of chopped tomatoes (since our tomatoes haven't ripen yet).  Complete with my homemade Greek yogurt and homegrown asparagus:

This was just using up some left over dilly new potatoes.  Dh made a homefries sort of concoction, topping it with one of our eggs.

We're actually low on eggs right now.  The heat shut most of the chickens down, and one hen went broody so she's not laying.  *&^% freeloaders.  We might have to dispatch with this current group and get a bunch of new ones.  Unfortunately, ds#1 is rather attached to one of the hens, Licorice...actually most of the hens except for Four of Five...so we may have to keep them for longer.  I never knew he was quite so sentimental. 

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Will it ever be Spring?

What comes to mind when I say "Spring"? I hope you said "horseradish harvests!" because then you'd be right. Dh and the boys harvested the previous weekend and then dh made a nice batch of horseradish sauce. Here are the roots they harvested:
Our favorite way to eat horseradish sauce is to put it on top of fried eggs, but it also makes an incredible veggie dip when mixed with sour cream (our horseradish sauce is pure horseradish roots and organic vinegar). Jars of the stuff:
We keep the jars in the fridge and freezer and don't can them. I'm not sure that they can be canned, if you know that they can, please let me know!

Dh started some seeds - spinach and lettuce - outside before we left for Spring Break. Right after we got back, he started seeds indoors - bib lettuce, various onions, and various tomatoes. Here they are all cozy and happy on their heat pads and under the grow lights:
He also started some stuff in the greenhouse, but darned if I can remember what. *sigh* And because these are totally not enough, he also stopped by Mays Greenhouse for more seedlings and White River Co-op for seed potatoes.

Mother Nature must have heard my whining because it is starting to feel like spring these past couple of days. Yay!

What have you started from seed?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams