Vegetable Gardens

In the spring I usually eat a lot of salads as the lettuce is really coming up, but by summer my lettuce just isn't as appealing. Usually it bolts or becomes bitter. I ought to plant more every couple of weeks to keep up a supply, but invariably I don't. Also about now I have a lot of veggies that I can eat as finger foods. I have lots of turnips, kohlrabi, and peas getting harvested. The radishes were harvested a while back. These are the last of the French Breakfast. As summer goes on I'll get zucchini, cucumbers, and beans. They are all improved by a dip of some kind. I have two favorite dips and the nice thing is that they are healthy too. One of my favorite dips is hummus. Not only are the vegetables that I dip from the garden, but so is the main part of this. The beans. I didn't use garbonzos, I used a white bean. White Bean Hummus1 cup dried white beans1/4 c lemon juice 1/4 c tahini 1/4 cup olive oil 1 clove garlic 1 T chopped fresh flat leaf parsley 1/2 t cumin 1 t salt Cook the beans (if you never cooked dried beans before, there are plenty of instructions on the web on how to cook them) and save some of the bean water in case it is needed later. Cool. Blend all the other ingredients until smooth in a pureeing device of your choosing. Add the beans and blend until it is a smooth as you like. If it is too thick add in some of that bean water to thin it out a bit. My second favorite dip is basically tzatziki without the cucumbers and with whatever herbs I like. It is a yogurt dip. And interestingly enough I usually like it best with the traditional dill. The one above was made with basil, parsley, and chives. Not my best. I think the parsley over powered it too much. Usually I like single herbs, but occasionally I feel like I have to mix it up. Yogurt Dip7 oz plain Greek yogurt1 clove garlic grated 1 T lemon juice1/2 t salt 1 T to 1/3 c of chopped herbs of your choice, 2 T of dill would make a nice tzatziki 1/4 - 1/2 c grated/diced vegetable - optional, 1/4 c cucumber would make tzatziki, but if I could eat tomatoes I could imagine a tomato based one too, or spicy peppers I keep thinking about coming up with a honey mustard dip, but I keep stopping myself. The two dips above are pretty healthy as dips go. A honey mustard one wouldn't be. With all that sugar (honey) and mayo - oh it would taste good, but not good for you. Hummus might have a lot of fat in it, but the fats are both very good for you. And some fat isn't bad. Many of the nutrients in your veggies can't be absorbed into your body without a dose of fat.

Posted by Antonio_Reis These varieties are easy to grow and guaranteed not to let you down at harvest time

The portentous and self-important group of meteorologists and climatologists have delivered their verdict: it may rain for the next 10 years. Or, er, it may not. Perhaps. This is such tremendous horseshit. Meteorologists in the UK struggle – by their own admission – to forecast the weather accurately more than three days ahead. This very week, I have watched as their 48-hour forecasts have changed almost hourly… without ever being correct, even then. There is not a snowball’s hope in hell of their calling this one right. The last few years of crap summers may be no indicator whatsoever of anything. Purely random, unpredictable, inexplicable. After all, as I’ve written on this blog, it’s happened before (1310-1330). But that doesn’t stop them issuing their pointless edicts and predictions. People just can’t resist trying to foretell the future. Related PostsDisappearing rain (6)Drowned rat (7)Drought: Are you suffering? (12)Onions in, stress out (7)Waiting for rain (9)Zemanta

I grow Chenopodium giganteum, also known as Magenta Spreen. It is a very useful spinach substitute, coming up when the weather warms and still useful when it starts to bolt where upon it will self seed prolifically. So much so that it will crowd out more annoying weeds like a certain annual grass that infests my beds. However, if you don't want it, it is very easy to remove or just weed whack and leave to enrich the soil. Yes, I am making the case for C. giganteum as a green manure.*The bright pink one is C. gigantium and the silvery one is C. album.Chenopodium album, also known as lamb's quarters, grows itself though I have to say I have less of the silvery stuff than my buddy the gaudy pink green. This is perhaps because I tend to pull out the latter.And here is what I think is Chenopodium giganteum x album.** Perhaps it's a pale variant of Magenta Spreen or perhaps it's a true cross. I have a couple patches here and there. They are more vigorous - i.e., gigantic then lamb's quarters. I shall name it rosy quarters.See the dusky rose in among the shouting magenta?***Chenopods contain a number of food plants such as:Good King Henry, Chenopodium bonus-henricus - perennial with edible shootsStrawberry Spinach, Chenopodium capitatum - green with beet like 'berries'Quinoa, Chenopodium quinoa - yummy grainHuauzontle, Chenopodium nuttaliae- grown for its edible broccoli like flower headsMagenta Spreen, Chenopodium giganteum - delicious and highly colourful spinach substitute.Lamb's Quarter, Chenopodium album - the well known weed of disturbed soil and foraged or found green.* Apparently I'm not the only one. The wiki article on tree spinach also mentions it as 'a high quality green manure.'** Okay so according to the internet, C. giganteum is sometimes listed as a subspecies of C. album but then again sometimes not. As it is, I'm not entirely clear on the taxonomy. If you are really curious, you could wade through this Molecular differentiation of Cheopodium album complex and some related species using ISSR profiles and ITS sequences.

Posted by Antonio_Reis We've embraced technology in order to provide you with exciting new ways to learn

I plant two full 16' beds up with corn and butternut squash. You can never have too much sweet corn. The squash is a bit more than I can eat in a year. I give a lot of it away and bring squash dishes to parties a lot in the winter. Eating the corn however isn't a problem at all. Sweet corn is one of those few things from the garden that my husband will happily eat. And he raves about it. I don't plant both beds at the same time. Last year I even planted each 8' section successively. They didn't turn out very successive though as the later planted ones caught up to the early ones a bit as the weather warmed. This year the first bed was planted on May 28th. The second one was done yesterday June 17th. So about three weeks apart. I'm thinking they will end up being about two weeks apart as plants mature not based on the growing days, but on the GDD or growing degree days. And the weather is warmer in July and August than it is in June. I'm not sure if my guess is accurate though as I've never had a running total of my GDD for the year. Knowing your GDD is so useful as it can tell you a lot about when something will need to be picked or when an insect will start bothering your crops. My favorite GDD chart is from the Medina Beekeepers. They have one that lists the GDD of flower blooms times throughout the year. This year I'm importing the data from my weather station into a spreadsheet and calculating the GDD. I've got one number on top that I can change that is the base number (the temperature above which the plant will grow). The base number is usually 40 degrees or 50 degress, but different plants grow at different minimum temperatures. I figure with a running total for each day I can figure out when to plant something like corn if I want successions to mature at a give rate. I remember planting peas last year in succession and three weeks difference in planting time only equated to a one week difference in maturity. But back to the garden. The bed I was using was just full of weeds. The front part wasn't so bad, but the back part in the sun was just filled with them. I even had two 8" tall self seeded tomato plants. But the useful self seeded plants for me were the herbs. There was a lot of dill and cilantro. I think I'll dry the dill and freeze most of the cilantro. Once it was well weeded, I did the usual prep work. I fertilized fairly heavily since it was corn and squash. They are both heavy feeders. I don't really turn over my soil, but I do loosen it with a garden fork to aerate the soil. This time I didn't even rake it smooth since neither squash nor corn really need a smooth seed bed. I planted the corn in the middle 10' of the bed. I plant corn on a one foot grid. I put three seeds into each hole. I will thin them down to one provided too many come up and if there are gaps in the germination I'll replant once I see the others come up. I want two squash plants at the end of each bed so I planted three seeds where I wanted each of them. Unlike the corn, usually all the seeds come up with squash, but it never hurts to have backups.

We have a flowering plum tree in our front yard. I'd say it's 15-20 years old now, and it has never fruited. It's not supposed to. But this year we have plums! They are very small, they look rather like Bing cherries. I happened to notice them today, so I plucked one off the tree and popped it into my mouth. Mr. Granny had fits, and insisted it was probably poisonous. I said no, it's a plum tree, it has plums. Very good tasting plums! Sweet, juicy plums! While visions of (sugar) plums danced in my head, I picked a few. Mr. Granny said "They have worms". I said I hadn't seen a worm in the one I ate, but then again, I didn't even really look, I just ate. I picked a few more. Even if they had a tiny worm or two, I could flick them out. It wouldn't bother me to eat them as long as the worm was gone. I took them in the house and cut one in half. Or, at least I tried to cut it in half. It turned out to be one of those that will not come loose from the seed, so I just had to kind of gouge it away. And there was the worm. I tried another. Another tiny worm. Like I said, it wouldn't bother me to eat them, once the tiny little worm came out, but there was no way I could open every one of those little fruits to check them out. The only way they could be eaten is to pop the entire thing in your mouth and chew the fruit off of the pit. I'm sure I've consumed worse things than those tiny worms, but I just couldn't do it! Plum pretty.I had to open 3 more of them before I found one with a worm. It's right above the tip of the paring knife.So....since I couldn't do plums, I did sauerkraut. I went out to the garden and picked two more cabbages to add to the two I had in the fridge. Since my (almost) new Cuisinart food processor broke while grating a piece of mozzarella cheese, I had to use the mandolin to slice up five pounds of cabbage. We'll discuss the Cuisinart in a separate blog post. And maybe the piece of crap new Black and Decker electric can opener. :-( After mixing in some salt and then letting it sit for an hour or so to go limp, I packed it firmly into clean quart jars. I smashed it into the jars until the brine covered the surface, leaving about an inch of headspace.I cut some cabbage leaves to fit the top, then pressed them down over the contents until the brine rose above them. Then I used some crumpled plastic wrap to ensure the shredded cabbage would stay under the brine.Lids were put on, and the jars were set on paper towels on a large plastic lid. They went out to the garage, where they will stay fairly dark and cool for the next 6-8 weeks. I'll check them every few days to make sure the brine is still covering the cabbage. If any has seeped out, and it usually does, I'll dissolve a tablespoon of salt in a cup of cold water and add it to the jars.There were a lot of outer cabbage leaves, and bits and pieces that didn't go through the mandolin, so I decided I needed to use them to make a big pot of soup. I tossed the scraps into the pot with parsley and onions from my garden, carrots and celery not from my garden, some beef soup base and water. I simmered it for a loooong time, then strained the resulting broth into another pot.I pureed the carrots and added them back into the broth, then added corn, peas, green beans, carrots, diced tomatoes, a can of white beans and a lot of course ground pepper. I simmered it for another loooong time. Oh, my, it was the best soup! I had a huge bowl of it for my dinner, saved some for the next day, and froze the rest.So....the plums were disappointing, but the rest of the day was quite productive!

6/10 - Raspberries are being picked about every other day now, and we have been enjoying them for breakfasts as well as on angelfood cake slices with a dollop of whipped cream. The second head of broccoli was harvested and used in my stir fry (I didn't make Mr. Granny eat it, all the more for me!). The small Gonzales cabbage was used for coleslaw. I'm not sure I'll plant this variety again, as it's very spicy and I prefer a sweeter cabbage. The two small peppers were sunburned so I picked them, but they were quite bitter tasting. They are still in the fridge, but probably will end up being composted. No problems eating the potatoes though, as they are always welcome! I also pulled one garlic (not shown) to add to my homemade pizza sauce. 6/12 - More raspberries. I wish they'd never stop! 6/13 - Fresh peas and potatoes. These were promptly eaten for dinner. 6/13 - I love this Anuenue lettuce, it's so crisp and sweet. I wish germination had been better though. I had a bit better luck with my second planting, but then the sparrows ate the tops off of the seedlings. I rescued a few and got them transplanted under protective netting, so hopefully they will survive. It's supposed to be a heat tolerant variety. I certainly hope so. 6/14 - Seeing red! Everything harvested this day was red. The strawberries are just beginning their second crop, and are much larger than the earlier berries. This Dark Red Norland from 6/14 is the largest so far, at 8 ounces. 6/15 - The Golden Acre cabbages are now ready to pick. They aren't as large as last year's, but still too big to fit into the harvest basket. There was a lot of earwig damage, but once I got all of the chewed up outer leaves off, I still ended up with nearly 3 pounds. At least two more must be picked today, so I'll probably be making sauerkraut this afternoon. 6/15 - The Red Sails lettuce has been coming in non-stop. Last week there was so much of it in the fridge, I ended up taking about half a pillowcase full out to the garden and trench composted it. I pulled the last of it from the main lettuce bed to make room for the Anuenue lettuce seedlings, but I have two more rows in the main garden, in various stages of growth. As soon as this batch has been consumed the newer plants will be ready to harvest. It's odd, but the sparrows don't usually bother the red lettuce, but they annihilate the green.6/15 - More raspberries and peas. The peas are nearing the end, and will probably be pulled by the end of this week to make room for a planting of pole beans. Although I missed having snap peas this year, I must admit we certainly have had some lovely meals from the shelling peas. This week's harvest:Broccoli: 2.6 ouncesCabbage: 60.8 ouncesGarlic: 1.7 ouncesLettuce: 22.1 ouncesPeas: 45.8 ouncesPeppers (sweet): 3.5 ouncesPotatoes: 85.1 ouncesRadishes: 1.4 ouncesRaspberries: 54.4 ouncesStrawberries: 4.1 ouncesTotal this week: 281.5 ounces (17.59 pounds)Total to date: 63.2 poundsBe sure to check out Daphne's Dandelions to see what others have harvested this week!

The harvests started with me picking most of my kohlrabi as I had to plant the last of the sweet potatoes. Over three pounds of strawberries were picked. This basket contains the disappointing Napa cabbage harvest that was attacked by earwigs. I picked the first of the fava beans. Michelle says she eats the whole pod sometime. I wasn't sure I wanted to sacrifice the inside bean for that, but I had to try it. The flavor is very different. I haven't decided if I like it yet or not. And more turnips were ready to pick. The Japanese turnips are interesting. They don't mature like radishes. With radishes you pick them all at the same time, but turnips mature over a much longer time. So I get some every week which is nice. The Michihili cabbage was also attacked by earwigs. I cut off the green parts since that is what they ate. Luckily for me the ribs are what I like most. More peas started to dribble in at the beginning of the week. I picked over 10 pounds of chard most of which I gave away. The piles is deceiving. It is much taller than it is wide. I'm surprised it didn't fall over. One monster kohlrabi (1lb 10oz) was hiding in with the broccoli plants. I obviously got the plants mixed up when planting. Whoops! More peas were ready at the end of the week. I'm sure I'll be eating peas most every day with lunch. I make dips and love munching on them. Some will get cooked, some might get pickled, but most will be eaten raw. Well actually most will be given away. I put more in my townhouse mates fridge than in mine. I also had the first picking of basil and parsley. The parsley will just get chopped into whatever I'm making, but the basil was dried. And since I was out of onions in the house, I picked more bunching onions. I find that I'll use them for meals if they are already picked, but often I don't go out and pick them during meal prep unless I'm desperate. Picking a good handful every week works the best for me. Alliums 0.47 lbsBeans 0.21 lbsGreens 14.06 lbsGreens, Asian 5.11 lbsHerbs 0.64 lbsPeas 2.49 lbsRoots 1.39 lbsWeekly Tally 24.37 lbsYearly Tally 81.18 lbs, -$86.99FruitStrawberries 3.41 lbs Harvest Monday is a day to show off your harvests, how you are saving your harvest, or how you are using your harvest. If you have a harvest you want to show off, add your name and link to Mr Linky below.

It is a challenge having dinner with someone that doesn't eat vegetables. How do I add them in? Well his soup just didn't have any bok choy in there. But don't tell him. There is Chinese cabbage and bunching onions in those wontons. I pureed them with the seasonings and shrimp in the food processor. Then mixed in the ground pork. I found them much lighter than the ones we get at the Chinese restaurants. And much easier to cut through with my fork. I had some left over mix of Chinese cabbage and some other veggies. Probably from making the wontons. I needed to use them up. So I tossed them inside some pot sticker skins and fried them up. Technically you aren't supposed to fry two sides of a pot sticker but I did anyway as the bottom was starting to get too dark. They were so good but anything is tasty with the sauce that goes with them. These were just for me. Sometimes it is nice not to have to share. And speaking of pot stickers. Here in Boston we have always called them Peking Raviolis. Supposedly the name is unique to our area. Though it is rare to see a vegetable one. They are always pork. I've always wondered whether the name is just used here or it is an internet fable. Has anyone else heard them called that in other parts of the country? Ah mac and cheese (or in this case ziti and cheese). It is such a comfort food. The recipe I use is healthier than normal. Though I use whole wheat pasts to increase that. I love the taste as it is a bit like Welsh Rarebit - a cheese sauce I've loved since I was a child. I of course added veggies to mine (fava beans, snap peas, and garlic scapes). I put ham in my husband's. Yesterday we had terriyaki chicken on a homemade whole wheat bun. The sides are Boston baked beans (with beans and mustard from the garden) and some grilled sweet potatoes and garlic scapes. I thought those two veggies would meld better. Sometimes contrast is good. But nope. I ended up picking them apart. They were both good, just not together like that. I had leftover chicken from last night that I wanted to use up, so I made a fried rice. I put in two normal things, snap peas and bunching onions. But the third was kind of a weird thing for a Chinese dish. I put in about a quarter cup of chopped parsley. It made it taste not Chinese at all. But it was very good and it brightened it up a lot. I was surprised that I took photographs of all five dinners I made this week. Joel and I love going out also and typical go out twice a week for dinner. So those would be the missing two dinners. We have a new restaurant opening up just two blocks from our house. We can't wait to try it. Finally a new restaurant that isn't Italian. It isn't that I don't like Italian, but our neighborhood is historically filled with a lot of Italians and Greeks. The problem with that is we had five Italian restaurants (Maria's - best thick bread pizza, Franchescha's - best cannoli, Olympia, Olivia, and Sabatino's - best thin crust pizza) in the neighborhood already when we were getting our last new restaurant. And of course it was another Italian one (Comella). I kept thinking we didn't need six of them in our little area. Oh and I wasn't even counting Za which is a gourmet pizza restaurant which weirdly I give the title of best interesting salad and they use local farms to source their ingredients too. We even got a new deli this spring that ended up being Italian. Joel and I were so sad to find out it was Italian. When we think deli, we think Jewish deli. Ah for knishes and matzo ball soup. But I digress. I always thought we could use a good Irish pub. What we got was the Menotomy Grill and Tavern. Menotomy is the name for the town before it was changed to Arlington, so it is an American bar and grill with a historic theme. We are now both praying that it is good since it was one kind of food really lacking in our neighborhood. That and the bagel bakery. Yes we will be all set except for our bagels. Right now we pay for our bagels