June 21st Harvest

Just a quick list of what I got today--

• garlic scapes: 4.3 oz 
• Zut alors! I have missed one!... or ten.
• black raspberries: 5.2 oz
• Unlike blackberries, black raspberries are non-native to North America, but are growing like mad in various parts of the property around the garden. Black raspberries are a similar color to blackberries, but are smaller- much like raspberries. We double-checked with our landlord that we could harvest these berries and he told us "Good luck getting to them before the squirrels."
• (mostly) admiral peas: 2 lbs 4 oz
• It has been super hot for a couple days and the pea plants are trying their hardest to send their pods out before they wither and die. We are trying to harvest these pods before the slugs eat them all. All in all, the admiral peas did (and are doing) vastly better than our other pea varieties. Not bad for a cover crop!

Happy growing! <3

CT Farm Fresh

Here in Connecticut, we have this great thing called CT Farm Fresh.  It's an organization that partners with local farms around the state to deliver fresh and local food directly to your door from farms around the state.  Every week, CT Farm Fresh calls up the farms that it partners with and asks them what they've got for that week.  After tallying it all up, all of the listings are put on a webstore (CT Farm Fresh Store) which goes up every Thursday afternoon sometime I believe.  Whatever you order is then delivered the following Thursday, and you're given a timeframe that's far more reliable than any home repairman or UPS delivery I've ever experienced.

You get to choose what you want and when you want it.  We've only ordered once, but it was great.  You pay a small delivery fee, which makes it worthwhile to stock up, instead of ordering just a few things every week.  The store runs the gamut of veggies, fruits, cheese and other dairy products, baked goods, meats, and other farm products.  Instead of spending a whole week driving across the state in search of fresh food from local farms, consider getting it delivered to your door!

Mid June Harvest

It's that time of year already-- where I work at my job all day (wearing high heels, ugh), come home and tornado-change into garden clothes and with a burrito in hand, stop by the chickens, to hang out, on my way to weed the garden, seemingly in vain. Keep in mind, this is not a complaint. This is exactly how I want to live my life (except maybe replace chickens with a less annoying creature). 

I suppose the end of summer is the real boom of harvesting, with the heaps and heaps of fruits that HAVE to get taken care of before the hard frosts kill everything off, but the rest of the year provides, too. The tomatoes aren't flowering yet, but some crops are already on their way out- like our early variety of spinach. I am astonished at the people who set up their gardens with only tomato season in mind- set plants in the ground around memorial day, and take them out at labor day. Think of all the wonderful foods they're missing out on!
June 16, 2012 Harvest:

• garlic scapes: 2 lbs 7.1 oz
• admiral peas (w/ shells): 2 lbs 15.9 oz
• fava beans: 3 bean pods

Now I get to figure out clever ways to incorporate garlic scapes into everything! This evening I made garlic scape ketchup- uh, yum! Here's a recipe for Garlic Scape Dip I'm going to try for a party I'm throwing this weekend.


When I was shelling 3 lbs of peas, to get ready for freezing, I was astonished at how spoiled we all are. It took me hours to shell roughly half a package of frozen peas. I'm sure there is some far more efficient way that it is done commercially, but in the good ol' fashioned way with my fingers, it took forever. But, if I was interested in the easy way out, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. Growing my own food gives me an appreciation for the food so readily available, too.

Happy growing! <3

This is why we can't have nice things

I'd love to have broccoli, kale, lettuce, cabbage, sunflowers, and beans in my garden but this is why I can't:

Never Quite Caught Up

This weekend was a busy one.  We got two inches of rain, but it was either fast-moving, or happened overnight, so I was able to work quite a bit still.  The biggest thing that I got done this weekend was to mulch my potatoes.  I hilled them with composted manure last week, and just now got around to mulching them.  I use waste hay, because it's available in large quantity, and it's dumped to compost in extreme proximity to the garden. 

In previous years, we've tried growing potatoes in a trench and filling in dirt as the plants grew, but we've had limited success with this method.   The benefit of that is that extra material is not needed to hill around the plants.  You simply use what was dug out of the trench to backfill.  Two years ago, my father tried this method and got a great yield.  For the last two years, however, we have not had nearly the experience that my father has.  I suspect that the flaws with this method are that we have rather heavy soil, and compaction is further encouraged by the digging and backfilling, and that by continually covering up the growing stems and foliage, the plant is weakened.  Then it takes longer to recuperate before growing nice tubers.  Instead, I chose to use a hilling method.  I buried my seed potatoes rather shallow; maybe 2 inches deep.  Once the first stems broke the surface, the plants grew vigorously!  Once they had reached their full height, I began hilling around their bases.  By the time I finished with the hay mulch yesterday, I noticed that many of the plants were blooming quite robustly, as I've never had potato plants do before.  I'll have to keep my eye of the hay level over the plants because I suspect that it will compact and break down rapidly throughout the summer, potentially leaving my tubers exposed to sunlight. 

Yesterday evening, I picked spinach, as it's starting to bolt.  I will replace it with New Zealand Spinach in the coming days.  This is a big event for me, because successfully growing spinach was #2 of my 2 garden goals this year.  The first goal has yet to be accomplished, but it's a long way off anyway. 

Washed and ready to eat!

I've always had trouble germinating spinach, and it's because I didn't understand the plant.  Usually I attempted to start it with my other brassicas, under moist, light, and relatively warm conditions.  This was a mistake.  This year, I did a little research.  I soaked the spinach seeds in water for 24 hours, and then put the seeds into plastic baggies with a wet paper towel, and then put that in the refrigerator until I saw their little white shoots coming out.  At that point, I probably could have set them in the garden to do their thing, but I wanted to keep a closer eye on them, so I arranged them in a flat tray and put it under lights in my living room until they had real leaves.  Then I set them out in the garden.  All of this happened late in the season of course, but I'm happy to have had a success!