June 2, 2012 Garden Harvest

First of all I transplanted all of the Genovese Basil to the garden.  There are 14 in the row garden. I placed them between the tomatoes.  It's supposed to help ward off tomato horn worms.  It worked last year in the square foot garden. We'll see how it goes this year.  I started the basil from seed. 

I also brought the pepper plants outside to sit on the porch and start to harden them off before transplanting.  Serrano, Jalapeno, and Bell. I started them from seed as well (except for 4 of the Serrano).  The Jalapenos did the best.  They sure are pretty and dark green.  Grow lights are wonderful! They are in the shade today but they'll get a little sun in the morning an then back to shade.  

I harvested a few strawberries.  We have a tiny patch and it looks like the voles are back.  I bated around the big square foot garden and need to get more.  It's an organic variety but it works amazingly well.  

And my husband, daughter, and son all loved them.  My husband even encouraged me to buy more and grow a bigger patch.  I wish I remembered which type they were but my mom gave them to me and I have no idea. 

This is Summer Time lettuce that I spread on my plate and added a little LiteHouse Ranch (soy free). And this is the first time growing Summer Time.  It's a head lettuce and it handles the summer heat very well.  It is delicious and pretty.  I can't have wheat (hives) so I use a bed of lettuce instead of a bun with my burgers.

And the Correnta Spinach looks yummy.  Can't wait to eat some of that tonight.

Garden update

My friend April - she is one of the smartest people in the world.  She started a magazine all on her own. Her oldest just got a perfect score on his ACT.  And April is also the best stay at home mom I know.  She was getting ready to grind some wheat yesterday when the neighbor said to her son, "WHAT is that?" To which her youngest son replied,  

"It's like a super hero cape - but for girls."

 If that doesn't give you a whole new appreciation for motherhood, I don't know what will. 

My morning started off in the fog.  I decided to go running anyway (I attract accidents and so I get nervous about anything that would impair visibility).  There was just enough visibility to make me feel like I would survive the run.  I saw my neighbor Babette out running too.  She was on her way home and I still hadn't reached my half way point. The fog started to burn off as I reached the top of the hill near my home.  I  love it when it looks like clouds. I can honestly say I never thought I'd ever run.  EVER! But I'm really enjoying myself.

And when I returned home I decided to work on the square foot garden.  I had to cut a piece off the 10x12 row cover and make it 8x14.  I also cut some of the extra pieces of the black pipe I used for the hoops and made clips.  

I planted Correnta Spinach and Little Finger Carrots today in this little garden.  During the week I transplanted 81 Big Daddy Onions, 4 Dutch Cabbage, and 5 Chinese Cabbage (Michihili) into this garden too. 

You can see my youngest in the background here. All 12 jalapenos are sprouting. 

All 4 Summertime Lettuce are doing well.  They'll go outside soon.  I decided to try and see if the spinach would sprout better in the 3" pots rather than the small window peat starters.  3"peat pots win!

If you look closely in the middle of the peat pot on the right you can see the first of the bell pepper sprouts.  I really hope that all of them sprout.  I love bell peppers. 2 cayenne peppers are just starting to sprout as well.

These are my Baby Bok Choy starts. Once they get a few more leaves I can harden them off.  I am hoping these crazy Utah springtimes don't send them bolting to seed.  My parents lived in Korea (my Dad is a medivac pilot) for a while and we love Asian greens. 

And my Utah Celery plants are looking pretty.  I can hardly wait to see if I can get these to grow once I move them outside.  Any tips?

All of my heirloom tomatoes are growing well. I can't believe that in 6 weeks they will be going outside and into the walls of water.  A couple I go to church with has this cool idea for using bolt cutters to turn cattle panels into the best tomato cages - perfect for indeterminate heirlooms that seem to grow super tall. Cattle panels are about $25 and you can make 3 cages from 1 panel.  I will definitely be making 3 - hopefully 6. And they store flat. Extra cool. 

And as you can see, these are getting out of control.  I may just have to break a piece off and start them over from a cutting or they might be too leggy.  I've never started heirlooms from seed I collected and I was worried about how long they'd take to sprout and grow but I can't bear to just toss them out.

All the bulbs and lilies seem to be poking out of the ground.  I am most excited about the purple Alliums.  Those on the west side of the house are really looking good. 

I also planted 18 basil plants this year to mix in between the tomato plants. I hear it helps deter those pesky tomato horn worms - we'll see.  

And then later today I planted 8 Early Girl tomatoes. If the ground would dry out a little I could get my garden tilled and plant all the peas - the bird on the mountain melted oh so long ago.

Cell phone pictures - sorry!

Harvest Monday - March 5, 2012

This is my garden on Friday - looking west. Most of the snow fell in one night.

This is my garden last week:

And here is a pretty photo of the long shadows in the winter Friday morning.

March 1st I spent the day planting seeds for peppers and heirloom tomatoes because Hot Peppers take 12-14 weeks before they can be transplanted outside.  Sweet Peppers take 10 weeks around here. And once I take all of the cold weather veggies outside and away from the sprouting station I will transplant the sweet peppers into 9" pots.

I brought the seed starting mix in from the garage in the 5 gallon bucket.  Then I added water and used my spade to add it into the pots.

 I planted 12 jalapenos, 12 bell peppers, 4 serrano peppers, and 2 cayenne peppers. 

I'm also going to try growing Baby Bok Choy this year.

And in these 6 inch pots I planted heirloom tomatoes which also take a lot longer to sprout and they are pretty slow growing.  I collected the seeds from last year.  This year I purchased seeds for Cherokee Purple which I've never grown before but I've seen that it's quite popular among gardeners.  While I absolutely adore eating Pink Brandywine tomatoes, I do love bottling tomato juice and making my own crush tomato sauce with roasted garlic (my mouth is watering).

Not quite sure why I started my romas.  huh. Early Girls will get planted the first of April.

I purchased the 3 inch peat pots in a pack of 22 for $1.50

Check out Daphne's Dandelions for more great garden ideas!

Harvest - uhm not quite monday

I didn't quite get this done for harvest Monday.  But my neighbor said I could go get as many peppers and tomatillos as I wanted because they were out of jars.  They grow over 80 tomato plants.  I didn't even count the pepper plants.  The left 3 bags are Serrano chilies. The front red is chopped salsa peppers that he didn't know the name of.  The right two bags are jalapenos.  The far right bags are tomatillos.  He said to just throw them in the freezer and pull them out as I want to make salsa this winter.  Yum! He also have me the gourds.  One of his pumpkins crossed with the gourds and is all warty and about 4x's the size of the other pumpkins.  It's going to look cool on their porch.  

I bout that tall metal bucket for $1.  It was blue.  I spray painted it black and it works perfectly with my harvest decor.  

Harvest Monday - September 5th - Labor Day

So this has been an interesting week with its twists and turn.  Thankfully the grasshoppers are no more.  I got sick just looking outside my windows but not any longer.  I even walked outside once today without shoes on.  Life is so much better now that the hoppers are mostly gone. However they are still in my garden.  In fact they've eaten most of the ripe tomatoes on 3 plants.  Good thing there are 22.

About every 4 days I end up with a harvest like this:

On Thursday I decided I had better get to work on some more pico de gallo before they went bad.  I quarter them and then scoop the seeds out.  In the other three bowls are tomatoes that I ran through my Roma Strainer. 

I ended up with 5 quarts of tomato sauce after it boiled down for a while. 

And 32 cups pico de gallo.

See - 32 cups right here.  Now it's in the freezer.  Wish I could find more of those Ball canning jars locally.  I love them for freezing salsa.  

Two of the quarts of tomato sauce before going into the water bath canner.

Genovese Basil - next year I am going to plant it around every tomato plant.  

And jalapenos - just enough for all my pico and even some incase I get to put away more this week.

Today's tomato harvest.  Weird heirloom tomatoes - half green, half red.  Oh and today I ripped most of the leaves off the top part of the heirloom plants to get some more airflow and sunlight on them. It's apparently going to frost soon. We get about 3 to 4 months frost free and then it's over.

Here is my big harvest.  I pulled these this morning - all 108 of them.  Considering that a medium size onion sells for $1 each during the winter here I am pretty happy with this.  Thankfully we only have 1 car in a 3 car garage although car #2 will be here soon. And Daphne, thank you for sharing how to braid them.  As you can see I will be very busy soon.

This is my largest heirloom so far.  It's a Red Beefsteak. 

And this is me being cheesy.  My husband took the photos for me and I was being silly and did this just as he took a photo to make sure the camera settings were the way he liked them.  BUT I always say the gardener is missing in most garden photos so I included it even though I was covered with dirt and looking like I just woke up and I was being cheesy. Nice.  Forgive me. I think I even stuck my tongue out and rolled my eyes a second after this.  Aren't you so glad he caught this photo instead?

This is a Big Daddy onion.  What's cool about all of these onions is that I started them from seed.  All 108 onions cost me 99 cents total.  Of course I have no idea what it costs me to power the pump for the well to water everything in the high desert but we'll ignore that part ok.

And today with the help of both of my children and my wonderful husband I have 26 more cups of pico made.  So that's 32 on Thursday and 26 today.  Nice - freezer is STOCKED!

And Bell Peppers - I washed them and saved 2 for chicken fajitas this week.  The rest I put in the dehydrator that I received when I graduated from high school.  Nice graduation present huh?  It sat forever.  But I use it more often now. I've had it for a long time. A very long time.  I am way older than I look.  I got a kids menu when I was 6 month pregnant with my oldest - I was 26.

And here is that ancient dehydrator with the bell peppers I picked today.  

It does the job so I'm good with it.  

Hope you had a great Labor Day!

More Pico de Gallo

I'm enjoying the tomatoes before the grasshoppers eat them all.  I made 7 more pints of pico de gallo yesterday and I also used my new Roma sauce maker and pureed all the roma tomatoes.  Then I made spaghetti sauce out of it.  I'm not sure if it's my soil but is there a way to get my sauce a little more sweet? (besides brown sugar)  My carrots are the same way.  I can't quite call it sour or bitter but it's a bit of something like that. 

I love that old scale but it's not big enough to weigh my pumpkins.  And my husband purchased it in Germany and so it is in grams - I have to spend a little extra time converting things (but it sure makes using his German cookbooks a breeze). 

And I've picked this many jalapenos twice but haven't bothered to weigh them.  I just wanted to get them into my food!

Pico de Gallo from home grown produce

I used 3 of these.

about a dozen of these

1 onion

some salt

a splash of lime juice

and some freshly pressed Korean Garlic

I didn't have any cilantro on hand

Tip: I use the food processor for the jalapenos.  I don't know why but it seems like less is more in the food processor.  I still chop them up with a knife a bit before I through them in.  Keeps the pieces more even.  But they seem to be quite hot when I run them through this thing rather than chopping them with a knife.  And of course small bits of jalapeno are always better than biting down on a big piece.