It's SEEDLINGS time!

Yup, it's that time of the year again - time to start preparing for spring, checking your seeds and maybe even start planting some for early harvest. Not all veggies of course can be planted this early. It's only mid-February of course, but you can start with the hardier type that can be transplanted outside in March/April - like Broccoli and Swiss Chard that are not afraid of a little frost at night and actually like colder weather.

I started my trays already thanks to my dear honey, who knowing my "quirks" as he calls it, bought me mobile cold frame. Normally you can build your cold frame outside and plant first early salads or herbs and let the sunshine warm it up through glass frames creating much warmer inside environment. Well mine is slightly different. It's a 4 shelf structure on wheels.
As you can see from picture above, he wired fluorescent lights on each level so my seeds won't get "weedy". It's also completely covered in plastic that can be un-zipped if it gets too warm inside but that's what allows warm air to stay inside and not escape into the room. So all I had to do was make a seedling mix - part organic peat moss and part soil, fill my seedling cups that are made out of recycled carton and is biodegradable, soaked it with water and planted my seeds. So far I have Broccoli of course, Swiss chard, 3 types of basil - regular sweet basil, purple and lemon type. Also some arugula, salad, some pink Brandywine tomatoes for early start - majority will be planted in about 3 weeks from now.

Each shelf can fit 3 of such trays so closer to mid-march I will start on my tomatoes, peppers and other goodies. By then I hope to transplant my Broccoli and Swiss Chard outside and clear out more space for new batch. I will be rotating seedlings every month or so to get smaller amounts but keep it growing in waves. This way it won't overwhelm me with harvest all at once and I'll be able to pick more each week.

Winter time

No, I didn't vanish into thin air. It's been very busy few months for me on the work front and not whole lot happening with the garden. As you might have guessed the harvest season finished early this year. We had first frost in September which did a bit of damage but we still had salads and some green beans for a while. But it's winter time now and with everything frozen over there's not much to do at this point. I cleared out beds before frost, put some fresh manure on top to be slowly absorbed during winter. For some of the outside areas I planted tulips and hyacinths and crocuses just to find out most of them being dug out and eaten by squirrels. I'll try to replant them in spring. Not sure how well it will work but will give it a try anyway.

In the meanwhile we've been enjoying some of the canned stuff that we did in summer - tomato sauces like marinara and salsa for snacking. Definitely had a bit too much of salsa so we've given some away. But winter is going to be long this year so it helps to have things around the house.

Is it worth it??

Some of my friends keep asking if it's really worth the effort to do all this. Wouldn't be easier to go to the store and buy the same produce even if it's organic and more expensive than regular stuff? And I just keep thinking you really need to taste something right off the vine or as soon as you picked it to really understand the difference between home grown and store bought produce. No matter how fast they try to get fresh stuff to the store, it will take time to package it, transport, unpack and put on the shelves. And by that time your produce isn't as fresh as it was in the beginning. And no, it doesn't taste the same. Did you know that they usually pick veggies and fruit semi-ripe so it would get transported easier and limit rotting? They spray most of the produce with ripening agent right before going on shelves to get the ripe smell/color but rarely they'd get the right taste. Even with the same tomatoes - they're normally picked green so they won't get squished in transit. By the time you get to taste it it won't be much to try - it will just taste like grass. No thank you! I'd rather take 2 minutes to harvest what I need for dinner tonight. Pick up my basket, go outside and pick and choose what I feel like having. Here's one from tonight pick. Wouldn't you want to have something like that on your table? So what did we get tonight? Here we have several varieties of tomatoes, eggplants, yellow and red bell peppers and sweet banana peppers.

And look, new variety of tomato came into the rotation - yellow Brandywine!

Just as big and meaty as regular but different color with a slight pink tinge on the top, and slightly more acidic taste. Delish in salad! Definitely worth the effort at the end. Yes, it takes time to grow them but anticipation makes it so much better.

Busy Harvest Weekend

Today has been very busy day - I had to do something with all these tomatoes that we've been getting. We've given many away but there's just way too much to keep up. Thankfully I think we reached the high this week so after this wave it should slow down. We'll have plenty for salads and such but nothing like it's been for past few weeks. Today I chopped, chopped and chopped some more tomatoes, onions, bell peppers . In the picture below you can see large mixing bowl where I dumped them after chopping and at that point it was just over 5 lbs cut up. And whole lot more left to go. I had to stop in mid-day because my hands have been very swollen so it's hard to handle knife or do much by myself. But we mixed home made salsa with onions and bell pepper, cilantro and hot peppers and canned it for winter. I'm not a very big salsa fan but once in a while it's nice to have around. We'll probably make more tomorrow as I have about 7 lbs mor of chopped tomatoes sitting in the fridge and more whole ones waiting to be taken care of at some point. I asked my honey to call his dad and see if he'll take some or maybe his brother and SIL, but his dad said he had plenty of his own and we couldn't get through to his brother so I'm stuck with this load for now. Maybe I'll just toss them into food processor and make more sauce or marinara or something.

Closer to the evening I had to take a break from the kitchen and went playing in the garden instead. Boy is it overgrown! Definitely need a good day to clean it all up. But I did pick out all potato experiments from both enclosed garden and open area. As you can see I have more fingerling's on the right side, Red Bliss in the middle - that was only 2 bushes that came out, and Yukon Gold on the left. There are some small red onions on the bottom of the picture.

Fingerling's were in the enclosed area and even though it was only about 2 square feet area it produced allot of results. Too bad I don't like the taste of them. I won't be planting them again next year. I do like Yukon but unfortunately that's the ones that got the most damage from groundhog and deer. I found many "leftovers" but not whole lot was left for me to pick. I will definitely plant more of them next year and this time in the enclosed garden. They are delicious! Well at least that's enough for two of us to eat for next few weeks. I wish my onions were bigger but they got trampled by deer who were trying to reach potatoes so didn't get to grow well. I will be planting more of them next year as well as some white sweet type.

Not a veggie actually..

Sometimes we get to see visitors around the garden that really like our produce. Like squirrels who love strawberries, deer that would eat anything green if it could reach it and groundhog that demolished my unprotected green beans. Today we got another type of visitor. One of them came around last fall and we got nice imprints because it was right after the rain. But today we got full frontal imagery.

He just came out in our back yard this afternoon while we were on the deck so grabbed a camera and took some pictures. Unfortunately he got spooked and run away so couldn't get clear shot. Isn't he pretty? I love when we get wild animals here. It's so sad that most people in cities will never get to see one upclose unless it was locked in a cage. I'd rather see one in my back yard munching on berries :) And right after him we got few more visitors. They're still small and cute with all those spots. I assume we'll be seeing them more often now that they're older and can move around more frequently.

More goodies from the garden

Another day another harvest. We've been picking things up in the garden pretty much every day. Right now it's peppers, cucumbers, beans and tomatoes season. Here you can see we picked cucumbers, sweet banana peppers and watermelon radish - I cut it in half so you can see why it's called 'watermelon'. Because the weather has been so hot it made these radishes very peppery but they're still quite tasty.

And the banana peppers are pretty good too. The ones that are completely ripe taste like regular sweet bell pepper with nice and crunchy flesh. Some not very ripe have a touch of heat to them. Either way I'm happy with them and will definitely plant more next year as they're very prolific in their yield. And then today I went out and got whole lot more tomatoes and cucumbers with some beans and peas for snacking. Don't they look lovely?

And I know what you might think - these don't look that very big. You'd need whole lot more to do something useful other than eating in salads. Well I admit that the picture is a bit deceiving. You see, it's been taken as an overhead so I could fit all items in one shot. I took one of these tomatoes (the one top right under the cucumbers) and placed it on my hand and took a snapshot. This will give you better idea of the real size of what I picked.

As you can see it's much bigger than my hand but in the general picture it didn't look all that big. So now you can look back at others and get approximate idea of what exactly we've been picking. Trust me when I say it's more than enough for our needs. By the way, the one in my hand is Brandywine variety.

Here I took closer snapshot of them and you can see different types - Brandywines with green on edges and couple of them turned upside down so you can see how bright pink they get on the other side. Top left corner next to orange bell pepper (which is really regular size pepper but looks small comparing to Brandywines) is German Striped Cavern - with yellow stripes inside. It's somewhat hallow with a cluster of seeds inside but very tasty. Then you have two Black Prince in the middle of the picture - they're somewhat tapered at the end and have darker skin. Haven't tried them yet and will do that tonight with the salad. And of course then we have regular salad tomatoes (big boy and Martin), few plum tomatoes and cherry tomatoes.

So what do we do with all this goodness? Well I took some of the veggies that we picked before and chopped them up, tossed them on a skillet with onions and made a tomato sauce. So the plums and salad types combined with banana peppers were used up in a sauce. It came up at about 2.5 jars of sauce so we took 2 jars and canned them for winter.

My honey actually did that for me. He's pretty good at this too, did the sterilizing etc. Remaining sauce we used up with pasta for lunch/dinner. Very tasty actually. And what's really important to me is that I know it's all organic with no added preservatives or chemicals. I'm looking forward to the winter time when I cook something Italian and will be able to use my own sauce and not a store-bought. We also gave a whole bunch of tomatoes away to someone else but there are others that getting ready to ripen so I'm sure we'll be making more of these canned goodies. One thing for sure - next year I'm planting just as many tomato plants so I can do this all over again!

Veggie Overload

I know it's been few weeks since I've posted anything but it's also been crazy time for me so please be patient. As you know once the garden starts producing it keeps going until frost time. In May-June it was lots of greens and now in July it's more of a typical veggies that you can find in your local farmer markets. If you looked at some of my other posts you'd know that I've been expecting few things to ripen up, so here they are. In the first week of July I had my sister down here so she got to pick few things. Like these fingerling potatoes and green beans.

This was actually an experiment and I didn't know if they'll grow at all. Why? Because these were just your regular store-bought fingerlings that I got from local store, put them in a brown bag on the bottom of my fridge last fall and forgot about them. In spring I was doing "spring cleaning" and found them and since they started sprouting I just tossed them in the garden in two small rows. Well they grew and actually produced like crazy. Potatoes that are pictures came from 3 bushes - 1 row in my raised bed. I'm yet to pick the remaining potatoes. And then we had explosion of cucumbers. They are the ones that were planted outside of the protected area and the only 5 bushes that actually survived the hard frost we had at the end of May.

Of course at the same time we picked bunch of snap peas for snacking and strawberries. They're still going on strong by the way. And a week later right before my sister had to leave we picked out some of the new potatoes - regular this time. I packed them up for her to take to LA and we had cucumbers for eating in salads.
Afterwards came ichiban eggplants and carrots. Actually I've been snacking on carrots for a while now but eggplants were first ones in the bunch. I had to leave so didn't get to eat them myself - my honey took them to work for his secretary who said that they were delicious and with less seeds that your regular eggplants. It also helped that they were very young and not overripe. And then I had to leave for work-related trip so didn't really get to do anything in the garden. However my honey did and he surprised me with few things. He's been picking up cucumbers every couple of days while I was gone and then decided to can them so they won't go bad. So by the time I got home he had 5 jars of pickles ready and waiting.

His only complaint was that garden is "high on steroids" when it comes to producing rate. Well with the amount of rain we've had and hot weather it's not surprising that everything is ripening. He's been picking some salads and tomatoes for eating right away and he had some fried ichiban eggplant that he made himself from another one that ripened while I was gone - there are many little ones hanging on the plant. And then when I got home first thing I had to do of course was pick up ripe veggies.

As you can see we're overloaded with tomatoes and cucumbers and first banana pepper and asian eggplant was picked as well. This is the first wave of tomatoes and lots more coming up later on. For now we've picked italian plums, cherry tomatoes, german striped cavern and regular salad type. Few other types are still ripening like Black Prince and Martin and of course I'm waiting to try Brandywine. They are not as productive as others but the tomatoes are HUGE! They're still growing in size but some look like a small plate. Can't wait to try them!