Experiment Gone Right

 Yesterday I decided I needed to thin the parsnip bed. You know, the one that had been interplanted between my spring cauliflowers and cabbages. As you can see from the photo above, they have turned out pretty well and these are just the thinnings. They are quite a mix of large and small, short, stout, long, skinny. I got 2 and a half pounds of parsnips and if I weren't to get another parsnip out of this garden, I can still say they are the best and most I've ever grown. But my hope is that the ones remaining in the garden will get bigger still and sweeter with the cool weather coming. So I would say that my interplanting experiment was a success and I will plant parsnips that way again next year because parsnips take such a long time to grow and I just don't have the space to devote a bed to them alone. Now if only my carrots did as well! I have a long way to go to be able to say I've grown good carrots.

 On another front, two years ago we planted a little apple tree. We coddled it the first year, but this year a rogue blackberry patch engulfed it (and it's gotta go!), but above you see our very first McIntosh apples, all four of them. They are quite ugly and scabby looking because I didn't protect them in any way, but I ate two of them and they were delicious! I have dreams of future apple pies now.

And a number of people suggested I try salad with my abundance of kale. Since we no longer have any garden lettuce at the moment, it seemed like a good idea, so I went online and found a recipe for Massaged Kale Salad. The massaging softens the kale to a wilt which makes a nicer salad, since kale is not terribly tender. Well, jackpot! I really liked how it tasted and the health benefits are a bonus. So thanks for the suggestions!
Lastly, a little bit of blogger business. I have only had this blog for a little over a year, but I noticed recently that the photos on my older posts are gone. They simply show a blank screen with a little symbol of some sort on it. This is quite annoying because I have friends who go to read the old posts and they don't always make sense without the pictures. Does anyone know why this would be? I haven't seen this with other blogs I've read. Any helpful answers would be appreciated. Have a great week gardening friends!

Harvest Monday: Garden Fatigue Edition

I'm feeling kind of blah about the garden this week. We are a week into September and experiencing what I call garden fatigue. The harvest is steady but limited in variety and things look a little sad down there. Many of the older plants are diseased and dying and my fall crops never do that great. Those plantings that survived are still smallish and only have about a month before our earliest frost either does them in completely or at least slows them down considerably. For some reason this is the time of year that the wild creatures become more active too and I find a number of plants that are chewed on. The one thing that keeps things looking at least somewhat perky down there are the marigolds. This year I actually got them planted out and they are blooming merrily. Sorry, I don't have a picture of them today but hopefully will in a coming post.
But back to garden fatigue. When the garden gets to this state I lose a bit of my enthusiasm and tend to pull back on some of the basic jobs I should be doing, like watering and weeding and even taking photos. I'm doing far better this year than usually, so things are improving on that score, but I need to give myself a stern talking to to get things done and that doesn't always work.
The harvest now is primarily tomatoes. My vines are still loaded with them but the vines themselves are all but dead. Thankfully enough of them are big and with a pink blush that tells me they will still ripen, which is a good thing!

 Kale continues producing well and in fact, there is a new planting for the fall that is getting pretty large, so barring any creatures going for them they should provide a good harvest over the next few months. I just have to find some new and exciting ways to eat kale because it does get dull for all it is a nutritional powerhouse. We do kale-bean soup and I have a great sautéed kale recipe. But that's about it.

We were inundated with beans last week, but this week they've slowed down quite a bit. The Chinese Red Noodle beans are really coming into their own now. They have proved to be a hit with my husband and son, so I'll continue to plant them in future gardens. I have a late planting of green beans that will be ready to pick later in the week. You can see that I picked my first two winter squashes. They are Buttercup, which we love around here, one large and one small. I have two more still growing out there along with eight Butternuts, one Kabocha, one Long Island Cheese pumpkin and one mystery squash (likely a misshapen Long Island Cheese.) Not a ton, but it is my best success with winter squashes to date. Last year I grew the same number of squash, but they were all much smaller. My Delicata plants gave me exactly one stunted little squash and a ninth Butternut, the smallest, broke off its stem and immediately started to get soft around the neck.
You can also see leeks in the photo above, which were harvested for last night's supper of potato leek soup. Yum! That's it for this week's Harvest Monday, which is hosted by Daphne's Dandelions every week. I hope you're not experiencing garden fatigue and I hope mine has passed by the next time I post!

Harvest Monday

I am a little late getting my Harvest Monday post up today, because it's been a day of catching up with vegetable preserving chores. This past week we had visits from our niece and her husband, who live in Oregon, and our younger son who lives in New York. It has been wonderful to be with family, since we are all so far-flung, but I have been barely able to keep up with harvesting, let alone preserving. Today I am busy canning tomatoes and sauerkraut and blanching and freezing beans. I think I'll be at it into the night!
Don't have too many pictures either, but the harvest has been terrific. I am inundated with beans this year, to the point where I've been giving them away by the bagful just to avoid dealing with them all. They kicked in late, but boy, when they did they really went to town!

 The photo above is what I picked today and it totaled over 19 pounds of produce. It is representative of what I've been picking all week. My zucchini plants are all but dead, and my yellow squash is going fast, but it is putting out a last little flush of squashes. The trombocino is still going strong.
The cucumbers are slowing down, but I am still getting plenty for refrigerator pickles. I harvested green beans, more yellow Gold Marie Vining beans and Chinese Red Noodle beans.  I also harvested some of my very first dried beans, but I will post some photos of those on another day. Broccoli side shoots are still producing. Tomatoes are coming in fast and furiously and I now feel pretty confident that I'll be able to can enough stewed tomatoes to get us through the year before the vines are completely dead and the tomatoes stop ripening.

I pulled two of my larger leeks to see how they are doing and was pretty happy with them, but I'll let the rest try to get a bit larger before I take any more. We look forward to potato leek soup when the weather gets cool.
My August harvest total was 291 and a half pounds compared to 203 pounds last summer. Which is awesome! One good thing about having my son here was that I was able to send him home with the equivalent of a nice CSA box. He left here with a cabbage, a large bag of beans, a bag of cherry tomatoes, a trombocino, some heads of garlic, a container of refrigerator pickles, a container of homemade sauerkraut, homemade yogurt, jam, jelly, pickle relish and honey from his uncle's hives. He groused a little about having to carry it all through the streets of NY, but once he got it home to Brooklyn I'm sure he was happy to have it! Now if only I could get some of that good stuff to the son in Florida!
Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne's Dandelions each Monday where you can enjoy the harvest reports from vegetable gardeners everywhere. That's where I'm headed now!

A Mystery Tomato

In the winter, I ordered seed for an early tomato variety called Glacier. Like most earlies, they are supposed to be small, about 2 inches in diameter, and orange-red. I started several plants and ended up planting the two healthiest out in the garden. It didn't take long to see a significant difference between the fruits on the two "Glacier" plants. And this is what I got on one of them:

Two large yellow tomatoes. Now, I plant about 20 varieties of tomato. And I know I did not order any yellow varieties. Purple, yes. Yellow, no. So I have a mystery on my hands. What are these? The only thing I can say for certain is they taste quite delicious! Far better than the real Glaciers I have growing, but it's not likely I'll ever know what I'm eating!

Ugliest Tomato Ever Grown?

I've been reading a few postings out there about the most beautiful tomato ever. There really are some beauties and I've even had a few myself. But I present: The ugliest tomato ever grown? This one is a doozy. I don't even know what variety it is because once I'm out there picking them I put them all jumbled in a basket and I never remember which plant I took them from.

Crazy, isn't it? How about you? Have you had some candidates for the ugliest tomato ever grown?

Harvest Monday

This has been a good week for harvest here. I surpassed last year's total August harvest by quite a few pounds already and there's still another six days to go with beans and tomatoes really kicking in. I'm very happy to be getting the tomatoes, but the plants are all diseased and dying fast. Thankfully they had set a large amount of fruit so I hope to be able to can enough pints to get us through the year. We use a lot of tomatoes in our cooking!
I pulled the last of my beets, the remaining Lutz Salad Leaf. They didn't seem to be getting any bigger, so it was time. I have two beds of beets that were planted later, but I have yet to successfully grow such later plantings. They never seem to grow healthy and bulb up and this year isn't looking to be any different.

 There was more kale from my original spring kale plants, more broccoli side shoots and finally some carrots.

 My second planting of yellow summer squash is producing nicely, which is great since the early bushes did nada.

 The green beans are in full swing, the yellow pole beans keep on producing and tomatoes of all varieties are ripening at long last! And what's that? Two small zucchinis from my second planting of four zucchini bushes. So out of a grand total of twelve zuke plants in 2013, I've gotten maybe five small zucchinis. Amazing. The second run bushes are just about dead, so I'm not likely to see more.
The big green bouquet you see is celery, a mixture of Afina Cutting and Tango. I also got a lot of cucumbers, both Lemon and Double Yield.

 And lookee here! My very first Chinese Red Noodle beans! I haven't tasted them yet, but they sure look pretty!

 I harvested the last of the spring-planted cabbages yesterday. They are a variety called Bartolo that produce relatively small dense heads, but are really excellent keepers. Kept in a refrigerator last year, I was cooking with them in January. I have a bed of fall cabbages, hoping they mature before it's too cold.

 My peppers, which did so fantastically last summer are a pathetic lot this year. So it was nice to pick one nice fairly good-sized green one yesterday. And the trombocino is still making up for my zucchini lack. I counted eight babies coming down the pike. So I celebrated with chocolate zucchini cake made with shredded trombocino, which is the most delicious way to use up summer squash.

 This is the last of the lettuce for a bit. It's getting a little bitter, but still useable. There are eight small plants in the garden just trying to get large enough to take leaves from and I have some tiny seedlings that I hope to plant out in a few weeks. Hoping to stretch out the salad days more than I've managed in the past.

I'm joining in the Harvest Monday postings over at Daphne's Dandelions and looking forward to see what goodies everyone else is getting from their gardens this week!

A Little Bit Of This, A Little Bit Of That

This week it seems that the summer garden is kicking into high gear and with it a few interesting observations and oddities. The weather went briefly back to warm and muggy, but not really as hot as was forecast. Now it is dry, but sunny and somewhat cooler again. What strange weather this summer!
I am busy with harvesting and preserving veggies and though I've had the tendency to focus on my losses, the truth is the gains have far outweighed them and I'm enjoying my pest-prone, disease-filled, sun-limited garden more than ever. I like to try new things, so this year it is sauerkraut. I've never made it before, but you can see the batch I have going is fermenting nicely as evidenced by the bubbles. I tasted it yesterday and it is sour and delicious! It's magic! Just a combination of shredded cabbage and salt and voila! It really does taste like it's ready, so I'll be canning it soon, I hope. I've read that I should wait until the fermentation is complete and I don't see bubbling anymore.

 The bush green beans exploded into action this week! I picked 2 and 1/2 pounds of them here and there is a whole other bed that is just ripening and will be ready to pick in a day or so. I ended up giving these away since there'll be more coming in and I've already frozen some thirty bags of beans. The Chinese Red Noodle beans are almost ready to pick too and I've decided to let the Scarlet Runner beans mature into dry beans for seed.

 What I am really excited about are my parsnips. I experimented with interplanting them this year since I had no room in the garden for them this spring. What you see below are a few thinnings and I am so pleased at how good they look, albeit small. But they have another two months of growing ahead, so barring any marauding voles, I may end up with a good crop. Here's hoping. This interplanting seems like the way for me to go with such a slow-growing crop as parsnips are.

 The cucumbers are in high gear now and unlike last summer, I'm overflowing with them enough to make relish, pickles, eat fresh and give away. And my second planting is just setting fruit, so I'd better come up with some more ideas. I found this monster hiding behind a fence post yesterday. It's funny, I've never really had the experience of monster zucchinis hidden away under the foliage, but cucumbers get me every year! I can't figure out how I can carefully check the vines, which by the way are growing up a fence, not on the ground, every day and still miss such a big guy. Notice it weighs 3/4 of a pound!

 Thought I'd show him beside the next biggest cuke I got, by way of contrast. Wow.

 My second planting of yellow summer squash (variety is Saffron) consists of a single plant, but that single plant has already put out three times as much fruit as my two earlier plants. I picked five off the bush yesterday, including this Siamese twin. Garden oddity indeed! I also found a "horned" tomato, but forgot to get a picture before it ended up in the stew pot.

The garden is calling me, so it's time to get to work. It's the time of year when there is low humming going on constantly from all the bees enjoying the flowers down there, not to mention the hummingbirds who have discovered the runner bean blossoms. I love the summery sound of it. We need rain and I am getting tired of watering, but it has to be done for the small fall seedlings to stand any kind of chance out there. Time to pull some old plants and to plant some new ones. Time to consider how I'm going to improve the soil for next season and to clear areas around the garden fence so it doesn't feel so threatened by the jungle out there.