Vacation during harvest season

So I'm preparing for another vacation - this time to Europe with my mom.  We leave on Saturday.  Exactly in the middle of harvest season this year.  I had it all planned...last year this would have been well before the peak harvest season.  This year, it's smack dab in the middle of it.  I even have cherry tomatoes (Peacevine) that are beginning to ripen.  And worse, it's in the 100's outside - necessitating extremely frequent watering.  Dianna will be here - and she ensures me that she will harvest, weigh the produce, and water.  I still worry.  She's good at this, but these plants, this garden, is really MY baby.  I'm the one who walks it every day, the one who constantly monitors it.  I am the garden's momma.

So today I harvested two summer ball pumpkins at one pound each, and a yellow crookneck squash that was almost 1 pound (15 oz).  Yesterday I harvested over 2 pounds of haricots verts and pickled them.  Four pints of pickled beans.  Tomorrow I'll pick more beans, and then it's up to Dianna to keep the garden going while I'm gone.

So we've got a good start on the season, now we just have to weather vacations and we're good.  I will be looking at the gardens in France and Germany for inspiration.  And I will try to blog from my iPad about what I'm learning.  Stay tuned!

Mid-Summer Prep for Fall Veggies

It's always strange for me to think about upcoming cold weather and cold weather crops when it's 100 degrees outside, but now is the time apparently.  I got my Territorial seeds catalog and they are suggesting that we start cabbage, kale, broccoli and cauliflower now.  I did, they're under the lights in the basement.  Since I also transplant my lettuce outside, I started the fall lettuce crop as well. Outside I pulled the peas and direct seeded turnips and basil.  Hopefully our bunny friend will leave them alone - she's been munching on the carrots lately...

My big mistake this year was trying to interplant basil in different areas of the garden.  Next year it will have its own section, I just don't have enough for drying and pesto.  Hopefully there's enough time in the summer for the seeds to grow into plants. 

I'm hoping that the fall crop will do better than the spring crop - I got two measly 2 inch heads of broccoli and no cauliflower. The cabbage was OK - loose heads, but enough to make a good bit of slaw.  I still have to pick and use the kale, it's doing OK as well. 

Haricots Verts Harvesting

The importance of harvesting beans every day cannot be emphasized more.  If you are trying to be self-sufficient, you need the most productivity on the least amount of land...and beans are super producers!  But once they think they've set seed, they slow their production.  So it is imperative to pick every day or every other day.  Keep the beans harvested and you will keep the plants producing.  Dianna thought that I was obsessive, and people will wonder "why do you insist in picking every day?".  It's simple.  Most of what I do is all about productivity.  Square foot gardening, harvesting beans daily, companion planting, keeping the weeds out of the garden -it's all about getting the most food in the least amount of space while still using organic methods.  Day before yesterday I harvested 6 oz of beans, today 12 oz.  The magic is to keep harvesting, while the beans are young and tender.  The plants will keep producing well into the fall.

Rule number 4: Eat leaves with holes in them

I would never be able to be self-sufficient in veggies if I wasn't willing to eat leaves with holes in them.  Lettuce leaves, broccoli leaves, cabbage leaves - all of them will have some bug damage.  Of course they will, I'm completely organic in my production methods.  But just because the leaves have been munched on by something else, doesn't mean you shouldn't munch on them.  They're perfectly fine - as long as you wash off whatever it was that was doing the first munching.  ;-)

I collected some of my spring cabbage today (1 lb of loose leaves) and here's how it looked:

I will make it into coleslaw and no one will be the wiser - except me.

One note on spring cabbage, kale, cauliflower and broccoli: so far I have had very little luck.  No cauliflower at all, and you can see how loose the heads of cabbage are.  I got a 1oz head of broccoli - the largest one I got this spring, woohoo (sarcastic).  I'm fairly frustrated at that, but it means I should plant more spring peas I guess.  I'll plant fall broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage and see how that goes.

Zucchini harvest and "keeper" recipe

This year the zucchini is coming early - two medium ones that weighed almost a pound and a half.  They are Black Beauty - this year the first to mature.  Lungo Bianco and Cocozelle are on the vine, but not near ready to harvest.

OK.  Nice...but what to do with them?  I've been wanting to make some different recipes (grilled zucchini can only take you so far) and our neighbor Lisa found a recipe on pinterest for Zucchini cakes - like crab cakes only with zucchini.  This is what I decided to try.  Lisa came over and we amended the recipe a bit - here's what I did:

The two zucchini above, grated
1 large egg
1 cup cracker crumbs
Chardonnay smoked salt (from our other neighbor Celia) - to taste
7 leaves chopped fresh basil
2 medium garlic cloves, crushed
1 extremely small onion, grated
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Squish the zucchini in your hands above the sink - getting the excess water/juice out
Mix all ingredients in a bowl
Heat non-stick pan and put tablespoon-full dollops into pan, flattening slightly
Brown and turn over, brown other side
Put on cookie sheets and broil on low for a minute or less - just to make a bit crispier

 After tasting them, we decide that this recipe is "a keeper"!  She thinks her sons will even like them, and took one home for them to taste test.  A great use of fresh zucchini, and it was so fast that it didn't even make the house hot.

Pet-able chipmunk

We spend a lot of time outside.  Our patio is another room during the spring, summer and fall - it is where we spend the majority of our time.  And we enjoy watching the birds, butterflies, bats, rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks as we eat, pay our bills, plant seeds, weigh our produce, etc.  On our patio we started feeding the chipmunks so they would become tame.  Last year we invited chipmunks to come eat sunflower seeds, scattering them near our chairs.  A short-tailed chipmunk took us up on our offer and started coming when she heard our voices.  This is Stumpy.  (So named because she has a short tail.)  She is the bravest, most brazen chipmunk ever.  She lets us pet her.  She is awesome.

This is the second year of feeding and petting Stumpy.  She now comes to the patio when she hears our voices and has even jumped up on our legs.  We think she is letting us know that she wants more sunflower seeds when she does that.  She has avoided cats, fought with other chipmunks, and generally become the ruler of the patio when sunflower seeds are to be gotten.  She is smart and wonderful and so much fun to feed.  How lucky we are to have animal friends!

Peas finally!

I've been wanting to do a blog about my lousy pea harvest this year.  I've been extremely upset at the small amount of peas I've harvested, sure that last year it was much better and these two types of peas must be horrid for the IL garden.  This year I planted Dakota and Serge, while last year I had Lincoln and Knight.  Same amount of space - 16 square feet.  Up to now I'd only gotten a tiny bit of peas - not more than 5oz of shelled peas at most.  For shame!  And the ones still on the vine didn't seem to be plumping up either.

I was intent on letting people know about this year's experiment and how it paled in comparison to last year's.  Ha!  How wrong I was! 

This morning, before blogging about it, I decided I had to harvest and then go back to last year's records in order to check my memory - and get the exact stats on last year's harvest.  This morning I harvested a lot actually:

One pound and 10 oz of peas in the shell, amounting to 10 oz of shelled peas!  Well, guess what, last year by June 25 I had only harvested 7 oz of shelled peas.  This year, by June 22, I had harvested about 15 oz!  Obviously my memory of last year's garden isn't to be relied on.  It's a good thing I keep detailed notes.  That's the value of record keeping - I've found that no matter how sure I am of remembering how good or bad the harvest was, I never really can remember.

Here is my setup: peach tea, scale, and basket of peas waiting to be shelled, with my handy harvest record notebook at the ready...

Last year I was finished with the pea harvest July 11 and I had harvested 1 pound and 5 oz total.  This year, it seems, Serge and Dakota are giving Lincoln and Knight a run for their money...we'll see how it actually turns out, using facts instead of my memory!