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!

Harvest Monday August 16th 2010

Tomatoes, tomatoes and more tomatoes! We also harvested the beautiful orange wax pepper in my last post, as well as the first green bell pepper! I had to pull up a few of the potato plant due to crowding/space issues! All in all a productive week!

This Week's Harvest Totals:

11.790 lbs Tomatoes

2.5 oz Cranberry Beans

4.25 oz Bell Pepper

1.24 oz Wax Pepper

14.25 oz Potato

12 oz Basil

.03 oz Mint

Weekly Total: 13.932 lbs/6.319 kg

Seasonal Total: 30.13 lbs/13.667 kg

Harvest Totals have been updated.

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.

Some Color from the Garden - Shades of Red edition

A short trip to the plot today showed that shades of red are really standing out these days!

The sunflowers are exploding with color. This one in particular caught my eye:

I've been leaving a few Hungarian Wax peppers on the plant to ripen in the hopes that I can get a few red ones for seed. This one is the first to turn orange. In the back right of the photo another wax pepper from the same plant is still in the greenish-yellow stage:
I picked these Cherry Tomatoes this afternoon. They are black cherry, have a slightly sweet taste and are a wonderful dark almost purple color:
One pod of the Ottawa Cranberry Beans produced beans that were more red then the usual mix of cream and red the beans usually end up:
The Cranberry Bean jar (note the new jar) is filling up more and more each day:

Harvest Monday August 9th 2010

A great week weather wise! The tomatoes are coming in full force. Here is a nice picture of some of sundays harvest:

The beautiful bouquet of sunflowers was part of the harvest. We also finally got a few Scarlet Nantes carrots that had reached a good size! The hungarian pepper was just starting to turn from yellow to a more orange, it was picked to add a little zing to a homemade pasta sauce.

Last week we had eeked out 4 cranberry beans, but this week they really came strong! Each trip to the garden resulted in more beans being harvested:

Harvest totals for this week:

3.77 lbs Tomatoes

8 oz Basil

5.45 oz Cranberry Beans

2 oz Carrots

1.10 oz Wax Pepper

Weekly Total: 4.80 lbs/2.177 kg

Seasonal Total: 16.198 lbs/7.347 kg

Harvest Totals have been updated.

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.

What's growing for the fall?

As planting spaces open up throughout the plot we are slowly transitioning/planting fall crops. Here's what we have in the ground as of Sunday:
Kale - We were gifted 5 seedlings from fellow community gardener Marie (who provided our leeks at the start of the season). 4 of the 5 are doing really well!
Bush Beans - We planted a row of organic Fresh Pick bush beans. These are a Jade type green bean.
Butterhead lettuce - The Romaine was incredibly successful at the start of the season. Hopefully the Red Cross butterhead we planted will produce as well. Red Cross produces a mix of crimson and green heads.
Mesclun/Baby Greens - A mixed bed of Johnny's Selected Seeds Elegance Greens Mix, additional Ruby Streaks mustard greens, and Surrey (Arugula/Rocket with a 'wild arugula' look)
Onions- Egyptian/Walking Onions of course!
Beets - more Detroit Dark Red Beets! They were slow to mature and undersized in the spring because we planted late, hopefully this crop will yield larger end results.
Radish- A few interspersed plantings of Champion Radish
Spinach- A 2nd attempt at Bloomsdale Longstanding Spinach. Our spring/early planting suffered from our lack of experience and weed identification skills. Trying again in the hopes of better results.

As more space opens up I'll fill it with more greens/fall type crops.
What's to come in your fall garden?

Harvest Monday - August 2nd 2010

This week was an explosive week in the harvesting department! The first full sized tomatoes were picked on Wednesday. 2 Early Girl and 3 Striped Roman tomatoes:

We headed to the garden to do some major weeding and prep work for the fall on Saturday. When we got there we had discovered one of the striped roman tomatoes was collapsing out of it's cage under the weight of all the tomatoes that were on it! For the sake of the rest of the tomato plants we pulled the plant and took home all of the green tomatoes. We also grabbed a few cranberry red potatoes, some baby onions, 3 more ripe tomatoes, and a hungarian wax pepper:

We ended up picking 2 more ripe tomatoes, and some small bunches of Basil, Chives, and Sage yesterday which didn't make it into a photo.

Harvest Totals this week:

1.55 oz Cherry Tomatoes (including the first cherry tomatoes from 7/22)

2.84 lbs Tomatoes

3.44 lbs Green Tomatoes

4.25 oz Potato

1.05 oz Onion

.50 oz Hungarian Pepper

.55 oz Sage

.65 oz Basil

.45 oz Chives

Weekly Total: 6.75 lbs/3.06 kg

Seasonal Total: 11.394 lbs/5.168 kg

Harvest Totals have been updated.

Now that full sized tomatoes have certainly been harvested, the tomato watch is over. I'll note the first harvests and keep track for next year!

Another First harvest this week:

2 undersized Cranberry Bean pods had already dried out, yielding 4 Ottawa Cranberry Beans. The beans came from Daphne by way of Ottawa Gardener.

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.