Boston Local Food Festival this Saturday!

This Saturday marks the first Boston Local Food Festival presented by the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Boston.

The Festival will feature: local produce and fish, loads of delicious samples, cooking and butchering demonstrations from local chefs, local wines and beers, workshops, arts and crafts, live music and tons more!

26 local restaurants will be serving food, 7 farms/apiaries will be on hand with produce, 11 brewers will be on hand sampling wine, mead, and beer, as will over 40 speciality food producers selling a variety of locally made edibles.

For a complete list of the vendors check out this list!

Best of all the event is free for one and all!!!

The organizers are asking attendees to bring their own water bottle, reusable shopping bags, and utensils so as to reduce the waste produced by the festival.

The festival will be held at Boston's Fort Point Channel on the Congress Street Bridge and along Boston's Waterfront by the Boston Children's Museum.

The festival runs from 11am - 5pm

I hope some of my local readers will be in attendance. I'll definitely be there enjoying local food and beverages as well as stocking up my cupboards with some great locally produced edibles!

Look here for a review and some pictures(hopefully) after the festival!

Harvest Monday September 27th 2010

Fairly small harvest this week, dry beans have nearly dried up, the parade of peppers is winding down, the green beans are coming in small batches (there are only 3 plants but each picking is enough for a meal), and I managed to salvage 2 potatoes. Thus far the potatoes have been mostly a bust with no serious harvests and not many plants left to produce one. As it is my first season gardening its all a learning experience, the success' and failures will help me plan and execute better next year!

Harvest for this week:

Dry Beans 1.05 oz

Bush Beans 3 oz

Bell Pepper 2.95 oz

Wax Pepper 3.60 oz

Potato 8.05 oz

Weekly Total: 1.166 lbs/528.72 g

Seasonal Total: 52.37 lbs/23.755 kg

If you want to see what others are harvesting or share in your own bounty, stop by Daphne's Dandelions the home of harvest Monday.

Harvest Monday September 20th

A pleasing harvest this week considering the garden looks closer to when i started digging beds then the peak of summer. A delicious leek, the return of spring favorite mesclun greens, more bell peppers, even more wax peppers, and the debut of bush beans, with the promise of even more bush beans to come! The current mesclun/greens mix is my mixture of ruby streaks mustard greens, arugula, and 'elegant greens mix' from Johnny's Selected Seeds.

Harvest for this week:

Mesclun 5.20 oz

Wax Pepper 7.40 oz

Bell Pepper 16.05 oz

Leeks 3.90 oz

Bush Beans 3.30 oz

Dry Beans .35 oz

Weekly Total: 2.262 lbs/1.026 kg

Season Total: 51.20 lbs/22.224 kg

A milestone I am extremely proud of! In our first year of gardening, with no experience and some rudimentary knowledge we've grown over 50 lbs of produce in just under 5 months.

Gail and I were both skeptical when we started, but with hard work and a few missteps we can definitely call ourselves successful gardeners now!

If you want to see what others are harvesting or share in your own bounty, stop by Daphne's Dandelions the home of Harvest Monday.

A Garden Award, A Gift Certificate & Pictures

Saturday afternoon was the Fenway Victory Gardens annual Fens Fest, an end of the summer Barbeque with live music, a huge raffle, a flea market style 'white elephant' table, garden contests and awards.

It was a great afternoon, the weather was perfect, and I was really able to get a sense of the community aspect of the victory gardens. I saw gardeners I only saw briefly at the start of the season, as well as many (most) who I had never met before.

I even won an award!!!

Best New Gardener for my section! Along with the certificate pictured above I was also given a green ribbon and a 'medal' which was an outdoor faucet handle painted gold:

I also picked up one of the new Fenway Victory Garden T-shirts:

Finally, to round out an already fun afternoon of food and conversation with some fellow gardeners they held a raffle with some really great prizes. Gail and I ended up winning a $50.00 gift certificate to the Boston Public Library book sale, unfortunately Gail and I have plans the day of the book sale so we traded our prize to a garden friend for a $25.00 gift certificate to Johnny's Selected Seeds

It was a really nice way to wrap up our first year season as gardeners. Though the season isn't over yet, I'm transitioning to fall with kale, lettuces, leeks, bush beans, radishes, and hopefully potatoes on the horizon! Maybe even a walking onion or two if we have a warm streak mid fall.

Here are a few photos of some recent harvests

We finally got a decent showing out of our second planting of carrots:

The radishes came in fast and are crisp and delicious! I'll definitely be enjoying them until it turns cold:

Finally, a nice harvest of tomatoes, green pepper, radish and dry beans:

Notice the pot in the back left of the photo? We've made a few batches of tomato sauce and they are great! I'll be really excited to enjoy them when my garden is buried under snow and ice!

Long overdue harvest report/garden update

Non-garden life has caught up with me the last 3 weeks and unfortunately I was unable to update this blog at all. Luckily I did keep track of my harvests over that time so here is a recent, and long delayed set of harvest updates:
Harvests for this week:
Bell Peppers 4.35 oz
Radish 1.25 oz
Cabbage 11.65 oz
Wax Peppers 8.80 oz
Parsley 3.50 oz
Tomato 5.668 lbs
Chives 3 oz
Mint .75 oz
Basil 6.60 oz
Weekly Total: 8.162 lbs/3.702 kg

Harvests for the previous 3 weeks:
Tomato 8.481 lbs
Leeks 2.65 oz
Chives 1.05 oz
Beans 4.65 oz
Bell Peppers 11.30 oz
Carrots 10.20 oz
Radish 4.75 oz
Total: 2.163 lbs/980.12 g

Seasonal Total:
48.94 lbs/ 22.199 kg

Inching closer to 50 lbs. Not bad for my first season growing food!