Each day that goes by brings change to the garden. The potatoes are dug, the first planting of bush beans is spent and the plants pulled and put in the compost pile. It will be another couple of weeks before the second planting begins to produce beans. There is a little corn on the larger stalks. There are dozens of developing Tomatillos that will be made into simmer sauce and Tomatillo Jalapeno jam. The sunflowers are blooming.
The first few were the bronze colors, but now there is a tall lemon yellow one. I plant a variety mix of seed.
The grapes are plentiful and are beginning to turn purple. Soon some grape jelly will be made.
And this year they are up and off the ground.
The daily harvest looks different than a week ago, today there was the first red tomato and even though it was a plum tomato, it went in our dinner salad. I had gone out to pick a cucumber for the salad and came in with many, a few larger ones and a quart jar of of small ones that I put in to ferment to whole dills.
There are now three jars fermenting, one of sauerkraut, one of dill slices, and one of whole small dills. There are two already fermented of dilly beans in the refrigerator. The Jalapenos are getting of a size to start the pickled peppers that hubby loves with most dinners and some sandwiches. Two pints were done this afternoon as well.
Today has been dry and the evening ended with a beautiful pink sky.
Stay safe. Wear your mask. See you on the other side of this pandemic.
The savings from planting a garden is significant, especially if you prefer organic or using organic methods even if not certified, and if you prefer local so you know it is fresh and hasn’t been shipped across the country or from another country. There are some things you can’t grow in your climate, I understand that. I can’t grow avocados and bananas for example, but we like them both. My garden isn’t large enough to provide all of the potatoes, onions, greens, beans, and peas we eat in one year, but large enough to enjoy fresh and put some by through freezing, canning, or fermenting.
Toward the end of winter, maybe early spring, I bought a 5 pound bag of basic organic white potatoes from the grocer. Organic produce is usually not sprayed to suppress sprouting or over ripening, and this particular sack of potatoes began sprouting almost in the car on the way home. We don’t eat a lot of potatoes, so the bag was tucked under the sink where it would be out of the light and each time I took a couple of from the sack, I had to untangle the sprouts and pare the sprouted eyes from the potatoes. I finally gave up when there were 4 or 5 left in the bag, and as soon as the soil was warm enough this spring, I cut those potatoes so that each section had two sprouting eyes and set them on a tray to dry for a day, then planted them in a 4 by 8 foot bed in the garden. I didn’t expect much, they weren’t seed potatoes, just grocery store ones. Every piece I planted came up and the bed was a thick mass of greenery and pretty purple flowers, then the heat came, their season ending and they died back. I had read you should leave them in the ground for a week or so after they die back, but for the past three days we have had some intense thunder storms and a fair amount of rain. I didn’t want them to grow and then rot in the ground, so in a light sprinkle yesterday afternoon, I took the same blue plastic compost bucket over and dug potatoes with a garden fork and my hands. Those 4 or 5 potatoes left to sprout in the sack, produced about 12-14 pounds of potatoes. I don’t know what a good return on potatoes is, but these are basically free food, potatoes that were beyond my use for cooking, providing many weeks of food for our shelves.
I never have to buy pickles. One package of cucumber seed for a couple of dollars will provide plants for 3 or 4 seasons, giving us fresh cucumbers and plenty to make into the Spicy Bread and Butter, Dill quarters, and fermented dill slices.
Generally the 6 to 9 tomato plants I plant will provide tomato sauce for pasta, chili, or other cooked tomato needs, as well as pizza sauce to last the year or nearly so.
Hubby loves a pickled jalapeno with most dinner meals and on some sandwiches, and the plants provide enough for me to can a year’s worth. I never buy hot sauce, instead, hot peppers are ground and fermented to make enough for my cooking and condiments and usually enough to share a bottle or two with Son 1 and his family.
The garlic I grow will usually last the year or close to it. Onions will last for months before I have to start buying them. Peas and beans are eaten fresh and extras frozen for when the fresh foods aren’t available. So the $25-30 I spend on seed and plants provide many meals throughout the year.
The hens still aren’t producing like they did last year, but the three Oliver eggers all started laying again. I have gotten a pink egg and a blue egg this week along with a couple green eggs.
One very dirty hand from digging potatoes.
I hope that by planting a fall garden this year, that we will save even more with carrots, spinach, fall peas, and whatever other short season plants I can put in and protect from fall insects and first frosts.
Last night as it thundered, lightninged, and rained buckets full, I brought in the plastic pail I gather weeds in for the chickens and spread a huge garbage bag on the dining table to process the garlic for braiding. I watched two different videos on how to braid garlic and both were different, so I just did my own thing. The garlic was spread out, the dried roots trimmed and the dirty loose outer skin removed. They were sorted enough to see the sizes and braiding began. What a mess I made, but dry and easy to clean up after I was done. Every year I have planted garlic, I have planted hard neck varieties and they can’t be braided, but I ordered late last year and could only get soft neck varieties which can be braided.
It isn’t the prettiest braid, but what fun. While braiding, one of the stems had what looked like little round cloves breaking though it so I did some research. They are call bulbils and can be planted to produce small cloves that are then planted the following year, a two year process to produce bulbs of garlic.
There were only half a dozen, but I will plant them, well marked in the fall and again next fall to see how they turn out.
This morning, I dumped the compost waste from last night and tackled the onions, again filling the compost tub with tops and roots.
As you can see, the potato onion are small. Good for kebobs, or pot roast, or when I only need a bit of onion. After the bin was dumped in the compost pile again, the onions were loaded into it and relocated to the huge shelf and grid unit that Son 1 built several summers ago in the basement area that is not climate controlled, my “root cellar” in a sense.
The bottom two shelves are boards and store jars as they are emptied then filled jars as canning commences in the summer. The pressure canner belongs to Son 1 and DIL and needs some replacement parts. The top three shelves are hardware cloth with great ventilation for storage of onions, garlic, potatoes, and pumpkins. The onions were spread out at one end of the lowest wire shelf to continue curing and for use in cooking. Though I will replant a few of the smaller ones this fall, just because they are fun to watch develop, I will reserve most of my onion space for early spring onion starts.
As I evolve with my garden space and learn from my successes and failure, I learn to enjoy it more each year. This is the first year that I have tried the single leader on indeterminate tomatoes and love how they are up and not all over the ground. I realized after a couple of years that the asparagus bed was not well placed as it shades the beds on either side of it in the morning and in the afternoon as the sun moves across the sky. There isn’t much I can do about that without digging the bed out and starting over which would mean a couple of years without asparagus, so I need to use those beds for crops that mature early. This year it was peas in the spring, but bush beans are in that bed now that the ferns are tall. Tomatoes are on the west side, so they are getting afternoon sun, but I bought all indeterminate varieties and three of them ended up bush varieties and one of them is now sandwiched between a tall tomato and the asparagus so not getting much sun. Each year I grow something new and sometimes repeat, sometimes not. This year I tried soft neck garlic and will return to hard neck, already ordered; potato onions and will return to traditional onions; Chinese Cabbage, but will start them indoors; and ground cherries. Since they were just planted, we will have to wait and see.
If the heat wave ever breaks, I need to build the garden box and rebuild the one that had onions and garlic in it. The beds that will be fall garden need to be enriched and the ones that will be idle through the winter need a ground cover or at least a good thick layer of spoiled hay or straw. But again today, it is too hot! Last evenings thunderstorms cooled things off over night, but the heat and humidity are back.
Stay safe everyone. Please wear your mask. Today I went in our little local store to get a newspaper. Newly posted on the door is the sign that says “You must wear a mask to enter.” I asked the unmasked clerk if they were going to enforce it and she smirked and as well as we can. The owner and most of the customers in there were unmasked. So frustrating.
