Grow Grow Grow!

The garlic seems to have done very well with our mild Boston winter. I am keeping my fingers crossed for a great garlic harvest later this summer!!
The garden is off and running, nearly 3 weeks ahead of  when I have been able to get things going the last few years. Gail and I have made a few trips down there and have been hard at work weeding, digging and tidying up. We've also managed to plant a few seeds here and there - Leeks, Kale, Peas, Arugula, Radish, Spinach, and a Thyme plant with much more to come in the coming weeks and months.
Hopefully the on again-off again threat of rain will actually come to fruition- while Gail and I were weeding and digging we noticed the soil was incredibly dry. The water should be turned on at the Garden by now, I just haven't had the chance to make it down there to check.
Stay tuned for more growing updates!

Hurricane Irene Canning Session!

Gail & I ended up picking the perfect weekend for a massive canning session! While Irene inched up the coast and made landfall we were canning like mad. Here is the final haul after a weekends worth of hard work:

Let me just say: that is A LOT of canning for one weekend - 12 quarts, 8 pints, & 30 half pints!!! A mix of tomato sauce, beet relish, corn relish, and garlic pineapple salsa!!

The tomato sauce is chock full of tomato seconds & onions from our friends at Kimball Fruit Farm, as well as tomatoes, peppers, garlic, basil, and oregano from our garden! We have a simple hand-crank tomato mill to juice the 25lb boxes of tomato seconds we pick up from the market. Once we've gathered a few gallons of juice we cook it down and add onions, diced tomato chunks, garlic, and spices to our preference. When we feel the sauce is the right consistency we jar it and process it! We made 12 quarts and 3 pints of sauce this batch to go with the 11 quarts we've previously made.

The Corn Relish recipe is easy and can be found in the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving and the always wonderful Beet Relish recipe is the same one from last summer because there is no sense is messing with a perfect thing!

Finally, the salsa. I had scanned cookbooks and the internet and went over hundreds of Salsa recipes. Not finding one that was just right I decided to make my own, and the results were great! This is a delicious Pineapple Garlic salsa with oven roasted tomatoes.

Garlic Pineapple Salsa

12-15 big tomatoes, diced

3 onions, diced

15 cloves of garlic, finely diced

6 jalapeno's seeded, diced

6-8 hot peppers seeded, diced

3 cups diced pineapple

1/4 cup fresh cilantro

1 tablespoon salt

3/4 teaspoon chili flakes (more if you like it spicier)

3/4 cup cider vinegar

Wash & train tomatoes, Peel, seed, and dice into 1/4 in pieces.

Remove seeds from hot peppers, place in a small bowl. Pour boiling water over hot peppers just to cover, allowing peppers to steep for 10-12 minutes. Drain half the water. Puree hot pepeprs and remaining water in a food processor for 1 minute.

Combine all ingredients in a large sauce pot and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes or until mixture thickens.

Ladle hot salsa into sterilized jars leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Process for 15 minutes in water bath canner.

Like I said the salsa turned out great!! So great that the picture of all the cans on our table is missing a pint jar of salsa because we managed to eat it all in about a day!

With the canning, herb preservation, frozen breads, and other stuff we are ending up with a nice little stock of home preserved foods. Once schedules here calm down a little bit I will have to conduct a tour and tally of all the stuff we are storing!

Garlic Review & Lessons Learned.

My experiment growing garlic was a mild success and offered a few lessons. The garlic itself grew pretty well. Of the 31 cloves of garlic we planted last fall 28 of them produced garlic that we harvested. Between the 'green' spring garlic we picked early and the bunch I was able to dry we got a total of 1.11 lbs of garlic. 28/31 is a result I am happy with, but like I said there were lessons learned.

Lesson 1 - Patience. As it was our first attempt growing garlic we ended up pulling a good amount early as a way to check our progress, and use some of the garlic when it was still young and fresh. We also pulled the garlic a little on the early side. Next year we will still probably pull some spring garlic, but maybe a little less, and I will try and be more patient and give the garlic the final few weeks of growth it needs.

Lesson 2 - Salt marsh hay & leaves are an excellent overwintering mulch. After planting the garlic, walking onions, and relocating some chives last fall I covered them all in a thick layer of fallen leaves and salt marsh hay, and when Gail and I returned in April and cleared away the straw and leaves I found all the garlic, walking onions, and chives were flourishing!

Lesson 3- find garlic you like & plant more of it! The elephant garlic produced the biggest heads but the German Purple & Ukrainian hard neck varieties had the most flavor, while the soft neck produced smaller heads with a lighter flavor. I have set aside some of the best Ukrainian & German Purple heads we grew for planting this fall, as well as picking up additional heads from the farms that grow them.

All in all between the farms and the harvested garlic we set aside I should be able to plant in a larger bed this fall, leading to more garlic next year! Hopefully we will get enough next summer that I can self seed the following year!

Harvest Monday August 1st 2011

Peppers. A plethora of peppers is what we got for this weeks harvest. Along with a basket of dry (finally!) garlic and one more Cherokee Purple tomato! Still waiting on a Striped Roma but I have a feeling they will all come at once! You can see the garlic along with the bell pepper and the Cherokee Purple I brought home on Wednesday. More peppers came on Friday(see picture below) and on Sunday we brought another 6 Jalapeno's home, along with a container full of huckleberries!

Here's what we harvested this week:

Garlic(dry): 7.25 oz

Huckleberry: 11.10 oz

Pepper (Bell): 4.95 oz

Pepper (Cubanelle): 4.20 oz

Pepper (Gypsy): 3.40 oz

Pepper (Jalapeno): 4.70 oz

Pepper (Wax): 3.05 oz

Tomato: 5.90 oz

This week's total: 2.78 lbs (44.55 oz)

Total for the season: 12.65 lbs (202.40 oz)

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

Garlic

What can I say. I got a little impatient and Gail and I pulled the garlic up last week. Some of it was weighed as green garlic on Monday, and the rest is hanging and drying in our kitchen.

Overall the Garlic experiment was a great success. Next year I'll try to wait a little longer to pull it up, but it won't be easy!

Harvest Monday July 11th 2011

The harvests keep rolling in!! summer is definitely here with some heat and humidity that my peppers and tomatoes have really loved!

This weeks harvest is all about variety. Included in the harvest is the 3 heads of test garlic I mentioned last week that were dry enough for our liking. I also harvested the final 2 heads of Red Cross Butterhead lettuce. One of them is pictured here:

We also got down the basil (see below) and Gail made our first batch of pesto cubes!

This Week's Harvest:

Lettuce (Red Cross Butterhead) 1.056 lbs (16.9 oz)

Chives .55 oz

Walking Onions 2.65 oz

Huckleberry 1.50 oz

Raspberry 1.50 oz

Green Garlic 2.45 oz

Garlic 3.35 oz

Basil 9.75 oz

Total for the week: 2.416 lbs (38.65 oz)

Total for the season: 6.25 lbs (100 oz)

The dry beans and min-zucchini have had some critter issues so we will see if we get a harvest from them. The bush beans were so ravaged that I pulled them before they could anything. It's a constant battle against bugs, critters, and the weather. What's a gardener to do?!

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

Testing Garlic

As I mentioned on Monday Gail and I pulled some garlic this week as 'testers' for what is still in the ground. We previously pulled a few weaker stalks and ate he small heads as green garlic, along with some garlic scapes.

We pulled a random sampling of garlic plants and ended up with 3 more heads of green garlic as well as 3 heads of normal garlic - 2 softneck 1 hardneck that are drying out ahead of the main harvest which will come in the next few weeks.

Here is a better look at the garlic that made it home with us on Monday.

These 'spring garlic' heads are just a little smaller then their full size counterparts:

Here are the 3 bigger heads that we pulled:

As you can see the we wrapped the softnecks around the hardneck and are drying them together in our kitchen:

With space limited this is good practice for when we have much more to dry all at once.

All in all the garlic has been fairly successful so far. The cloves were planted a little to close together, so some heads have come out smaller then I would like but overall it is a minor adjustment I can make for next year!

Harvest Monday July 4th 2011

The Garden is starting to take off and kick into the heat of summer. Below is our incredibly fresh harvest as it was harvested today after a hard day of work and the great 4th of July Picnic/Barbecue the Fenway Garden Society threw. Here's what we harvested after some hard sweaty work this morning:

Chives: 4 oz

Mesclun Greens: 2.90 oz

Green Garlic: 1.25 oz

Lettuce (Red Cross Butterhead): 12.65

Total for this week: 1.3 lbs (20.80 oz)

Total for the season: 3.834 lbs (61.35 oz)

We also harvested 3 heads of non-green garlic which I will add to the harvest total once they are dried out.

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

Harvest Monday June 13th 2011

We hit our first milestone this week. Thanks to this weeks harvest we've passed the 1lb mark for the season! The name of the game this week was variety! Here is the single biggest harvest of the past week which included a little more kale, chives, parsley, green garlic, and even a few flowers!

What we harvested:

Chives 1.20 oz

Green Garlic 2.10 oz

Kale 2.55 oz

Parsley .80 oz

Radish 2.25 oz

Total for the week: 8.90 oz

Total for the season: 1.184lbs (18.95 oz)

This time last year we had harvested half of what we've had this year, but far more salad greens. What a difference a year makes!

We've had a few days of rain so I haven't had a chance to do much in the garden, but I'm sure I will have lots of weeding and harvesting in the coming weeks!

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

Opening Day!

Yesterday was Opening Day!!! Not for my beloved Boston Red Sox, but for my plot at the Fenway Victory Gardens, just behind where the Red Sox play! I retrieved all of the gardening equipment that we stored over the winter and Gail and I headed to the garden, wondering if anything would be alive.We were greeted with a lot of mud, wet fall leaves, and straw that we had used to insulate some of overwintering projects. Beneath the straw and leaves the garlic, walking onions, and chives were all flourishing! Below is one of the walking onions that had climbed through the straw in search o

f sunlight. The chives and garlic were both alive and ready for sun when we delicately pulled the soggy leaves and straw off of them.

We also brought along a bunch of herb seedlings we started on our windowsills as well as kale seedlings I picked up at Allandale Farm on saturday.

Picture above are the kale seedlings after we got them in the ground and pots with chives, garlic chives, marjoram, sage, thyme, rosemary, basil, flat leaf parsley, and a volunteer curly parsley. We are going to try leaving most of the herbs in the pots (except the chives we over wintered) and using the space that was occupied by last years herb garden to grow:

Horseradish! I ordered the above horseradish roots from Johnny's in the winter. They ship when it is an appropriate time to plant them in your given growing zone. The roots arrived in the middle of last week, and were kept in the refrigerator wrapped in damp newspaper until we planted them yesterday afternoon. Hopefully after the first fall frost I will be digging up enough horseradish to grow more as well as for a few batches of the delicious condiment.

In the coming weeks Gail and I will finish cleaning and preparing the plot for the growing season as well as planting, planting, and more planting!

Spring is back and so is the garden!

This Week's Harvest & Planting Garlic

I missed Harvest Monday!!!!! I was able to harvest a little bit last week though:

Bush Beans 1 oz
Dry Beans 1 oz
Leeks 2.20 oz
Mint 6.05 oz
Basil 7.5 oz
Weekly Total: 1.109 lbs/503.03 g
Seasonal Total: 57.74 lbs/26.19 kg

Dry Beans, Mint, Basil is all done for the season. We still have Bush Beans (maybe), Radishes, Lettuce (might be ready before it gets too cold), Leeks, Kale, and Herbs growing.
The Bush Beans have slowed down so it's a tough call to see if we end up picking more. The lettuce was planted a little late so if we manage to eat any before it gets too cold it will be a nice surprise.
We are slowly putting things to rest for the winter. Potato and Leek soup on the horizon will use up the rest of the leeks. Kale will be enjoyed after it gets just a tad colder, while most of the herbs will be left to rest under the snow.
Speaking of resting under the snow...
Gail and I did some additional end of season cleanup on sunday and managed to plant our garlic for next year. One of our back beds seemed the perfect spot to plant some. Space is limited in a small plot, but this bed will be dedicated to garlic until it is ready! We planted 31 cloves total: 7 cloves of elephant garlic and 8 each of: german purple hardneck, ukrainian hardneck, and some sort of softneck with small but flavorful heads. All of the garlic came from local farms/farmers markets. As garlic is a staple of my cooking I'm really looking forward to harvesting next year!

This weekend I will be picking up some salt marsh hay to mulch the garlic bed for the winter. I'll save the rest for later use as I shouldn't need all of it.