Harvest Monday, 12/4/17

The first turnips were just picked yesterday. The Tsugaru Scarlet turnips on the left are just slightly spicy and somewhat sweet, they would be great in a salad. The white Hakurei turnips to the right are sweeter and even more mild than the scarlet turnips, both would be good on a crudité tray. The Di Milano A Colletto Viola turnips in the center with the faint blush on their shoulders have yet to be tried this year, but they're usually a fairly spicy turnip which cooking tames.

The planting of gailaan or kailaan, otherwise known as Asian broccoli, is heading up well. Their flavor is very much like broccoli and the stems are wonderfully delicious. We've been eating these in soups but they would probably be great blanched and then sautéed with garlic.

This came from a package of mixed baby leaf pak choi, they're mild and tasty. I've been thinning them but they need to be thinned even further.

These flowering choy sums were planted much too close together, but with diligent thinning the later heads will get much bigger. The thick stems are juicy and the whole plant is delicious.

The red stemmed yu choy is also delicious, but it flowers later and so far we've just been eating them as a leafy vegetable in soups.

Mizuna is one of my favorite leafy greens, they're mild and delicious and their thin stems are wonderful as well. A lot of our greens are just prepared by sautéing with garlic or onion in a little bit of olive oil, or just added to soups.

Mibuna is also a fantastic green, it's a lot larger than I would have guessed from internet pictures. It has a different flavor and texture than mizuna, but just as delicious. The upright habit of Mibuna and Mizuna means their leaves keep fairly clean compared to spinach, lettuce, etc.

Tatsoi is a lower growing plant with a slightly stronger mustardy flavor than they other greens listed above, but I think they're still a lot milder than most other mustards.

It's usually dark by the time I've finished picking and washing greens, so I didn't get a harvested picture of them this week. I pick about 5 pounds of them once a week, even after washing they keep in the fridge really well.

There's lots of other greens growing in the garden which I haven't harvested with most being in the baby leaf stage. I'll be posting a bit about them in the next day or two.

We've been having light frosts in the upper twenties (-4 degrees Celsius), but are expecting a hard freeze in the low twenties at the end of the week. I'm going to try and cover the carrots, beets, and spinach bed with floating row covers.

Please join us for Harvest Monday hosted by Dave at Our Happy Acres, a place where vegetable garden enthusiasts share what's growing in their gardens.

Harvest Monday, 11/6/17

As part of thinning the beds and weeding, I've been harvesting choy sum greens and rapini to eat with spicy soba noodle ramen. These were seeded September 16th, so they are fairly large now and starting to form their little heads.

Choy sum is a tasty and juicy mild green with just a hint of the heat normally associated with mustards. But cima de rapa has a more assertive flavor that has a bit of bitterness, which tastes delicious with a dash of an acid like vinegar. But in ramen I usually add a squeeze of lime for the acid.

After tilling the garden, a bunch of squash plants came up. I got to harvest a nice amount of late season summer squash. There's definitely some frankensquash that look like one of their parents was a vining winter squash. And the greens are all putting on lots of growth with all the rain and moderate weather we've been having.

There were actually 3 different greens harvested on Sunday. On the left is choy sum with it's flowering heads, which is just sliced and sautéed with nuoc mam and pepper. In the middle is mizuna, to keep the plants going I just pick individual leaves. The real surprise was the mibuna on the right whose leaves grew to be a lot larger than I was expecting.

The summer squash were sautéed in olive oil with a little salt and Penzey's Mural of Flavor spice and herb mix. The choy sum and summer squash were served with meatballs and rice, along with roasted sweet potatoes that were mixed with olive oil and mild chili powder.

Harvested:
1.024 pounds of summer squash
4.128 pounds of greens

Please join fellow vegetable gardeners at Our Happy Acre's for Harvest Monday. A wonderful tradition where we share what's growing in our gardens.

Fall Garden Update

It has been a bit strange in the garden lately. The weather has cooled but there are pole beans blossoming. (These are volunteers.)

Volunteer bush beans forming tiny little beans.

With 6 weeks until our first frost, there's even the promise of summer squash to come. They'll certainly be from mixed parentage, possibly even winter squash mixed with summer squash.

I thought it was a little bee hiding in there, but I'm not so sure now.

The rapini needs to be thinned.

Mizuna might be big enough to harvest in a couple weeks.

And even mibuna is gaining some size, there's definitely some fast growing Asian greens out there.

You can see little tatsoi seedlings around the older plants, I just sprinkle extra seed down and tamp down with a rake just in case we want to harvest whole plants instead.

Choy sum grows really fast, right up there with turnip greens and rapini. The whole plant is eaten and they're especially prized for their succulent flowering stalks.

In contrast the sprouting broccoli is a bit slower growing, germination rates are lower, and the seeds more expensive. I'm really hoping they're the same thing I've eaten before at a relatives home.

I don't know if the beets are going to make it. It's really late in the season and they're still pretty small. They're going to get covered with agribon row covers and we'll see what they'll do. Either way, hopefully we'll get some greens out of it.

Red Russian kale are just too adorable with their long spindly stems and serrated leave.

I thought this was supposed to be a frilly leaf lettuce mix, but I can see kale in there and maybe mizuna.

Red Knight mizuna (F1) is a lovely russet color, these were direct seeded almost 3 weeks ago.

Peas had to be reseeded multiple times, but it looks like the older plants might actually produce something.

Turnips are seeded in the same beds as the peas. They'll get thinned once they start bulbing.

10 days ago I seeded more radishes and turnips. I'm really hoping for some delicious gigantic radishes in December.

And I've been, oh so diligently, keeping the carrot bed weeded. But they are incredibly slow growing. I might just have to consider it an experiment that's going in the negative column, and never again plant carrots after August in a north facing garden.

I'm not sure when to start using floating row covers. It's supposed to be in the mid-70's this week (21 degrees Celsius), which seems much too warm for them. I might wait till mid-November.

There's still some planting needing to be done like lettuce and spinach in the greenhouse, and fava/broad beans out in the garden. It's a much calmer pace this time of year, a very peaceful time to be out in the garden.

It's That Time of Year Again, Just Like the Seasons, Nanowrimo Has Arrived

NaNoWriMo, otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month, is coming up in November. So let's make it a date; you, me, and the goal of writing a 50,000 word novel in a month. It doesn't have to be pretty it doesn't have to be lyrical, but you may want to write the nuts and bolts so you can have a solid story structure by the end of the month. A scene can always be made beautiful later in the rewrite/editing, but the real work is building the framework of the story.

Myself, I had been preparing by using the Snowflake Method to design and flesh out my novel. But that was going painfully slow because I am terrible just terrible at developing plot. My natural instinct is to write by the seat of my pants, which means I end up with a jumbled mess and a few beautifully intense scenes. So now I'm working through a beat sheet which is going much faster, and hopefully I'll be able to move onto an outline this week.

For an added change of pace I will be writing outside my normal genres of thriller or dark fantasy thriller. Instead I will be going full on science fiction space opera. Ha ha ha, so very exciting. So part of my preparations for this year's writing extravaganza has been a bit of world building, and the creation of actual plot points. Shocking, I know.

I've even gone so far as to do some character development. For me, that means creating a landscape of moods and impressions. A dark untouched psychological well from which an individual's thoughts and emotions bubble up from. I like the atmosphere in the scenes to either reflect or be a contrast to the inner turmoil and demons that exists inside a character. The whole hidden danger versus known danger.

One of the things I have found this year, is the joy and beauty of ambient noise. Normally I write in complete silence. Who knew rainfall and quiet thunderstorms could relax and help bring focus? I actually thought sound machines were for sleeping. On YouTube there are all sorts of interesting ambient noises like Star Trek Bridge Noises and there's also ones for snow falling. I grew up in an area with bitter cold winters, so find the whole blizzard noise thing very peaceful, but oddly yet it makes my heart race. And eventually I start feeling the whole trapped Flowers in the Attic thing.

You may wonder how a person finds the time to do nano while working fulltime and having a little kiddo. I write only at night after our child goes to bed and early in the morning when everyone is still asleep. The lack of sleep can mean getting sick from being run down. To offset the lack of sleep, I eat very healthily. Especially a healthy wholesome breakfast, although I'll be drinking an unnatural amount of coffee. Knuckle bite, I've even purchased a Vietnamese coffee filter to make really strong espresso like drinks mixed with sweetened condensed milk and served on ice.

Lastly, I've actually started using Blogger Pages to do all my book development work. It's easier than keeping multiple documents open on the computer or searching through folders for files. Sorry, they're not set for others to view.

So have fun, and I hope to see you writing this November.

Seeding a Fall Vegetable Garden

Self-sown beans

In the United States most of us are well into fall/autumn and I wanted to do a big fall garden this year which means lots of direct seeding. It's been in the 90's (32 degrees Celsius) for most of September. But cooler weather is predicted for this weekend, so I've been running around like a crazy person this week preparing the rest of the garden beds.

A few things did get started in containers, but they were visited by one disaster after another. If it wasn't squirrels digging and mangling seedlings, than it was birds pecking off every single spinach seedling in 3 containers. Then there was the torrential rain.

For the month of September I have been direct seeding in the garden:

• peas
• radish
• turnip
• carrot
• beet
• sprouting broccoli
• sprouting turnip
• spinach
• lettuce
• chicory
• endive
• mizuna
• tatsoi
• mibuna
• choy sum
• pak choy
• gailan
• komatsuna
• corn salad
• mustard

Direct seeding is definitely where it's at. Sprinkle a few seeds on the ground and water everyday till they germinate, then watch them grow. I just love watching plants go through their whole lifecycle. So fun.

When the seedlings are little and just starting to germinate, I water by hand everyday with a watering can that has a fine stream. Once the plants get a bit bigger, I'll start thinning/harvesting.

With it being so hot most everything is germinating in 3-4 days. Although, I had to replant one of the pea beds a couple times, either due to old seed or planting them too early in the day and they ended up cooking in the ground.

Plans for October:

• Dig and plant the bed for fava beans or broad beans.
• Dig and plant the greenhouse with spinach, lettuce, and peas.
• Direct seed even more turnips and radishes

I hand dug the beds, broke up the top crust with a rake, broadcast sowed the tiny seeds, and then tamped down the soil with the top of a rake. For beets, carrots, turnips, and radishes I pulled back the soil, broadcast the seeds, and then covered with soil.

It's definitely a little late for planting carrots and beets but we should have two more months of frost free weather, and there's always a chance for a mild winter.

Mingling with self-sown bush beans are rapini/sprouting broccoli, sprouting turnips, and kohlrabi.

Sprouting broccoli or broccoli raab.

Choy sum is a green that is usually allowed to bolt, the flowering stems are supposed to be deliciously sweet and crunchy. I've had them prepared by quick parboiling and then quickly stir-fried with garlic and salt in a very hot pan. So good.

The pea beds are interplanted with turnips and Giant Luo Buo radishes.

Little snap pea seedlings. This bed came up fine, but the peas in the other bed had to be replanted 3 times.

Sprouting turnips or Sessantina cima di rapa

 The pretty serrated leaves of Early mizuna.

Mibuna is such a stately leafy green.

The every pleasant tatsoi.

Tomato cages are being used as supports for the peas, and then turnips and radishes are planted in-between. You can also see the self-sown squash and okra in these beds.

Radishes and turnips taste better when grown in cooler weather, so I try to do a second planting of them in October. Just in case the September planting sees some hot weather, which can make the turnips and radishes a bit too spicy.

Harvest Monday, 8/21/17

Monday is the day of the eclipse and we should have a good view of it here in Western Kentucky. I have to work today, but our supervisor has scoped out a good place to see it and we should be able to take a peak during lunch. People have been buying up all the eclipse glasses, I figure quite a few of them are planning to sell these items for exorbitant prices. Bottled water and bread has been bought out at stores, it's like Y2K all over again. Not sure how the eclipse is supposed to effect water service...

In other news, we have cut down all the tomato plants and cleared out their cages on Saturday. The plan is to till the garden in preparation for fall planting in the next week or two. It took less than an hour to cut down the plants and clear out the cages. There were lots of green tomatoes and ripe tomatoes still left in the garden, but I was ready to move on.

Everything listed below was picked on Saturday.

With my husband's penchant for speed during the big tomato cleanup, I did not get a chance to pick any of their fruit. I managed to get a handful gleaned from the ground afterward.

Some green ground tomatoes.

And lots of hot peppers were picked. This is a mixture of Anaheim, jalapeno, Hungarian Hot Wax, Lemon Drop, and Santa Fe Grande. None of the peppers were especially hot this year, probably because of a mild and extra long spring.

The peppers were under-performers this year. Numex Joe E. Parker an Anaheim type has consistently been unproductive the last 2 years with only a few peppers per plant, although the peppers can get huge. Numex Big Jim is much more productive for me.

The hot peppers will probably get made into pickles, and maybe I'll try freezing a bunch in the form of poppers.

Queensland Blue has massive leaves for a winter squash. We had lots of squash vine borers this year plus the ever present squash bugs. Actually there were lots of new and unusual stink bugs with the majority of whom I've never seen before. Queensland showed signs of vine borer troubles early on.

 And here's that telltale sign of a vine borer, a bit of "sawdust" at the bottom of the stem.

Yokohama was the most productive having produced 6 pumpkins. They're all in various stages of ripeness with even a tiny green one on the upper left.

Thai Rai Kaw Tok also only produced three pumpkins. I think all of the varieties grown this year were susceptible to vine borer damage.

Black Futsu only produced one pumpkin from 3 plants. Next year I'll mainly grow cushaws and butternuts which are supposed to be more resistant to borers. 

And the two tiniest Delicata squashes ever. They were definitely overrun by the other winter squashes, but I've grown them before and only ever get a couple of fruit.

I ended up canning about 500 pounds of tomatoes and giving away close to 500 pounds this year. This last week I've been playing the avoidance game with the garden. I just couldn't deal anymore. I canned enough quarts of salsa to last us years, then there's tomato juice, quartered tomatoes in their own juice, and green tomato pickles.

We ended up with 38 quarts of green tomato pickles. It was actually fun experimenting with different flavorings for the pickles and making vinegary syrups. I was going to wait a month or two before opening them up and giving our opinions on them.

Some thoughts on this year's varieties. All the tomatoes were early this year by a month and with lots of consistent rain and cooler weather the flavors weren't the most intense, but they were still wonderfully delicious. We were picking large varieties like Pink Brandywine and Black Brandywine by the last week of June. Smaller varieties like Taxi and Black Prince ripened the same week as Sun Gold.

The two latest varieties to ripen were Yellow Brandywine and Aunt Ruby's German Green. Yellow Brandywine is delicious and very productive, Aunt Ruby's is less productive but the flavor is outstanding a mixture of citrus, melon and good tomato flavor. But keep in mind, they set fruit late and ripen late.

Cherokee Purple and Pilcer Vesy are the least productive tomato varieties for us. I probably won't grow either varieties again after trying these last few years. A couple years we didn't even get a single Cherokee Purple tomato from their plants.

There were lots of scary giant spiders in the garden during the dry part of August. A couple female Black Widows with their round distended bellies and I even saw a smaller male black widow in one of the female's web. The male and female were actually found on the bottom of a winter squash, which is why I always check what's going on underneath those ground dwelling squashes.

But the most interesting spider is pictured down below. So be warned, it is a close-up of a gigantic spider. I was crawling between the tomato beds when I looked up and saw a massive web and this hanging from the middle of it.

Giant spider picture below...



Wait for it....



And here's the spider.

You can even see the tiny hairs on its bottom leg segments.

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