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.