First Harvest Monday

We are going to join Harvest Monday, at long last!  We've been watching and reading each week about all the other gardener's harvests, and this year I have a new scale for a gift.  It is a hanging weight scale and reads up to 120 pounds (good for the large harvests of roots, squash, etc).  I am also bidding on a postal scale for the kitchen, for produce under 15 pounds.

Tonight for dinner we searched the freezer and root cellar - to come up with a minestrone soup.  A quart of tomatoes, dried oregano, a mix of our dried beans, carrots, potatoes, fresh parsley, grated zucchini and an onion - all with a tablespoon of pistou per bowl.  The only thing from the store was the 1/2 cup of pasta to maintain our soup as a true minestrone.  I love emptying space in the freezer now since we've recently added 25 pounds of a beef critter from my father's farm.

We had the day off due to the storm and I organized my seed catalogues, finalized garden maps and plans and wrote up the 'shares' since we may have some other folks to feed from our garden this year.  I may post these examples of shares, although August and September are the most exciting.

Winter Lulls

We're nearing the end of this 24 hour storm - but I took these photos when we returned home last night from Maine just when the storm was starting.

Despite the storm the chickens were crooning and singing to us - happy we were home and clearly excited about holiday left-overs.  They had laid 15 eggs neatly in rows in their nesting box while we were away - and all that remained of the last monster summer squash (harvested in July) was the tough shell.  I'd given them something to peck at while we were away and they appeared to have enjoyed it.

Coldframe - end of December

I decided to harvest the last of the greens from the coldframe - mostly going for the bok choy as that recovers well from a hard freeze.  We made a simple stir-fry for dinner last night with the bok choy, tofu and a julienned kohlrabi.  The coldframes were almost an afterthought this year and we didn't cover them, the wood wasn't insulated and the glass was single-pane, fitting poorly with some gaps.  We also were using up old seed and didn't have great germination on the cold-tolerant varieties, so I transplanted summer varieties to fill in the space.  All in all - a good showing as we ate lettuces and salads as well as raab and bok choy into the end of December.  As a comparison I'm uploading an earlier and later fall photo of the same coldframe:

Coldframe - end of October

Coldframe - end of November

Raspberry arbor

With M.Mann's help we built the tiny arbor with mostly reclaimed wood (meaning its fairly warped and asymmetrical).  The structure is simple with 2 x 4 posts, lattice up the sides, and 2 x 6 lintels sculpted with the jig-saw.  I noticed that a friend had some OLD redwood stain, and with 2-3 coats the streakiness fades.  The footers are actually sections of a PT 4 x 4, sunk into a hole filled with rocks and a small amount of ready-mix quickcrete.  We get a fair amount of wind up through the floodplain and didn't want to find a demolished structure amidst the raspberry bushes.  The arbor will serve dual purposes - a beautiful entry to what will be the Japanese garden, and supports for the raspberries wires which will run along the beds on either side.  

Cold work days

An unrelated selection of photos... this one above is the parsnip bed.  With each successive frost (nightly now) they droop a bit and with the wind, they're catching all the oak leaves.  I'm excited to dig these beauties as December comes along.  These are the first parsnips we've grown and I love the idea that they only improve as winter deepens - when all the other crops are finished.  Apparently the greens are edible, but we've not tried them yet as there are still plenty of greens in the garden and cold frames to satisfy us.  A friend came to help with the firewood this weekend and we tasted the sorrel and New Zealand spinach periodically as we worked, each of which was more tangy and sweet after the frosts.

A dehydrator special - Chili! - using up all the peppers from the garden, along with some pintos and onions, as well as tomatoes that we've been ripening in the garage.  We started with about half a bushel of green tomatoes at the last harvest in late September and more than half of them ripened within a week.  The rest are lingering, developing some rotten black spots (probably too cold?), but the chicks love the lycopene in any form.  The ones that do ripen well taste wonderful after a month without that sweet garden-fresh tomato flavor.

We wanted the neighbors to feel free to use our 'leaf corral' so we built something visible from the road.  The slats are from a nearby fence that fell down and are woven with twine to remain sturdy through the winds and snow accumulation.  We managed to collect more than 50 brown bags of leaves from our environs which we dumped into piles over this past weekend.  We have coffee grinds on the squash beds and these are each topped with lots of leaves.  The remainder of the leaves are in piles wherever we have space, ready for winterization of beds as well as mulch for the coming gardening season.

Conor is picking our two loveliest heads of broccoli from a seed blend of Fedco varieties.  Fresh broccoli takes so little time to steam, a fact which we often forget!  Two or three or four minutes is enough for these tender stalks.  There's one more big head, but the rest seem to have slowed growth with these ever-so-short days...

Winter Crops

Kale trees

I'm always surprised by how much time passes between our posts.  Lately I've not been home during daylight hours, biking off to work at dawn and returning after dark.  I have a few more months until that changes!  On the whole, though, the passing of seasons is delightful.  The weather has warmed up again and we're having brilliant sunshine.  Tough on the root crops in 'cold' storage, which are sprouting, but nice for us.  We've been eating kale almost non-stop - it's so delicious now that the first few frosts have sweetened it up.  Tonight I had roasted portabella mushrooms stuffed with kale and salata ricotta cheese. Delicious. Our most wonderful recent kale success was a nice potato/squash gnocchi tossed in sage and kale butter.  The trees themselves:

We have so many kinds of kale:  Wintorbor, Red Russian, White Russian, Rainbow Lacinato, and some of the more common varieties.  The collards are also doing well, and we tried a few parsnips last night but they're still starchy and would benefit from a few more good frosts.

Jack Frost

  The weather is brisk and rejuvinating, but the winter darkness is creeping in.  With the recent frost, a certain subset of the garden flora is gradually fading.  The collards, kale, broccoli, cabbage and all the lettuces managed to survive beautifully.  The first night was a lighter frost, followed by a pretty solid, hard freeze.  I had forgotten to put the glass on the coldframe, and fortunately had the first night as a warning of what followed.  But yesterday, in the howling winds, the top of one coldframe was lifted and carried 20 feet to smash in the blueberry hedge.  Oops.

We were relatively ready for the frost, but did have to pull the beets in order to save the greens and we lost a few shelling beans.  Otherwise, all the summer crops had been harvested.

The strawberries will be mulched soon, to protect the crowns from freezing and thawing.  They'll be ready to put out the flower hands come spring, and I'm already dreaming of the sweet juicy fruit.

Hiking in the Whites

Last weekend we went for hike up near Gorham,  NH in the White Mountains.  The weather was quite chilly - a reported 6 degrees overnight in the hut, and an early taste of winter.  It was amazing to see the gradations of seasons as we drove further north, from peak foliage in Massachusetts to snow-on-the-ground in New Hampshire.

A bear sharpened his claws on this tree.

The view from the ridge near Mt. Moriah.

Foraging

With the recent rains I've been finding a lot of mushrooms lately... my new passion. The ones above are Hens of the Woods and puffballs. The bright orange ones below are Chicken of the Woods, otherwise known as Sulfur Shelves. I sauteed each in butter, froze some and made some quiches. They're so delicious on their own but I imagine they'd be tasty in a pasta or rice concoction. I did dry the majority of them because its easier to just rehydrate and toss them in soups - and we've run out of freezer space.

Onion Drying

We dried our onion harvest on top of window screens propped up with two sawhorses. They spent about two weeks outside under a sheet. It rained lightly a couple of times but the sheet wicked the moisture away and they dried quickly. The idea with giving them the air circulation is to dry out the roots and tops to prevent rot while they're in storage over the winter. We harvested about 45 pounds of onions for the year, but I think with all the sauces, salsas and chutneys we'll use considerably more than that this year. The onions pictured here are Copra - good for storage. We also had a few varieties of sweet onions for salads and eating. Next year I'll plant some red onions and more storage ones. We interplanted with lettuce, carrots and beets - but the ones interplanted with lettuce didn't fare as well (very small). The idea is to get the tops really established and green before day length starts to decrease so that the plant has energy to put into the bulb. Onions also like plenty of water and fertilizer, and do well in fairly sandy soil, all conditions we're capable of creating... and we love onions.

Drying hops

We planted two kinds of hops rhizomes this spring, Willamette and Cascade. They grew the entire height of the deck - probably about 20 feet. The hops themselves started to develop by mid-July but we waited to harvest until the pollen grains were clearly visible and fragrant. To dry them, Conor knocked the bottoms out of the drawers of a small bureau and stapled a screen to hold the hops. By keeping the top drawer cracked and the bottom one removed with a fan blowing into it, plenty of air circulated up through the hops while reducing light entry. It took just under three days and the hops was bagged and frozen, waiting for the first estate brew.

Late Summer Harvests

canteloupes
tomatillos
cayenne, jalepeno, hungarian wax, big jim peppers


Late summer is passing quickly into early autumn. The major harvests of summer veggies are almost in, with the shelves lined and the freezer full. We've hung the 45 pounds of onions and more of potatoes, some squash are curing in the loft and more are still to pick. The melons made nice pickles, tomatillos a salsa verde, and peppers are now a jalepeno sauce.

Carrots and squash

The first harvest of carrots is in jars, nestled on dark shelves in the garage: 15 pints. The pretty purple ones are called Purple haze, the last of the 'purple' seeds from Katie (other favorites were purple basil and Purple Cherokee Tomatoes). We'll harvest the rest of the carrots as we need them, leaving some in the ground and some in cold storage for as long as possible. The canned veggies will hopefully be saved for late spring in the gap before the new gardening season begins.

A few odd squashes have appeared on our most prolific squash vines: Spagetti squash. They may be cross-breds. The acorn squash was very susceptible to the beetles and their diseases, but it looks like we may get 7 or 8 of those. There are more than a dozen spagettis, most of which are ready, and a few dozen Waltham butternut. All the cucurbits were pretty heavily hit by the cucumber beetles which carried downy mildew and a variety of other fungal diseases. The cukes and melons were especially bad so I just pulled them out as they stopped producing. Not a good year for cukes. I did put in some late plantings though, including a few melons which are getting big now, larger than grapefruits.

Eggplant

Summer Sauerkraut

Squash borer