Strawberry breakfast. Oh, I'm suffering so much ; D
Yes, I keep kale, lettuce, and herbs in water like a bouquet until I need them. Works slightly better than refrigeration. This looks like so much kale but after I cooked it it was only three modest servings.
Wow. I've been sitting on the porch, listening to a soft rain and the hum of the beehive. (the bees live inside the porch pillar)
The seeds and transplants are in the garden, except for a few fall crops that get planted later. The flowers my daughter bought are planted in the flowerbed. The new asparagus roots are, hopefully, all ready to sprout.
This weekend my husband and I were looking at the garden, a little disappointed with how small the (usually fast-growing) plants are. Then we had two rather nice, warm days, Sunday and Monday. BOOM, when I went out this morning the little guys seemed like they had doubled in size in just that time! I need to do some weeding. If carrots get overtaken by weeds earl-on, it seems like they really get stunted by it.
But I should also paint. hmmm.
I was slightly disappointed when I opened the pkg I ordered and found these seed packets for cucumbers and purple carrots. I quickly realized, though, that they are better; plain, non-glossy paper that can go in the compost pile when I'm done, no unnecessary picture, minimal ink used. I'm so used to fancy photos and lots of color that it took a minute to adjust! I sure do hope these carrots do well; our harvest last year (two different types from different companies) was embarrassingly minimal. Once it stops raining every other day I'll get out and dig the trench for the new asparagus I ordered from them.
I saved vines from last fall's sweet potatoes and kept them inside over winter. They're looking a little sad right now, but if they can hang in there until May, they can go back outside and have happy times at the edge between the main garden and the asparagus. I'm hoping that the vines run all through the asparagus bed in late summer and keep down the weeds.
I've been putting off digging the carrots (because the beans and the tomatoes are visible, so they've been monopolizing my attention). This morning's pleasantly cool temps, however, motivated me to get my butt out in the garden and grab a shovel. Also a hoe, because in the last month the garden has gone from almost-weed-free to knee-deep-in-weeds. How - does that happen? so quickly?
Anyhow. I hoed two raised beds, got fatigued depressingly quickly, then grabbed the shovel. I dug potatoes, just enough for a meal or two, then three sections of carrots. We plant in raised beds about 8x4 feet, I had two beds of carrots and two single rows of them that I shoved in beside other veg. The carrot harvest was DISAPPOINTING. The "red Samuri" seed hardly produced anything. About a handful, I am not kidding, for the whole bed, 32 linear feet of carrots. Also, one of them decided to make the leap from biennial to annual, and put up a flower. Carrot flowers, you may already be aware, look exactly like queen anne's lace. The orange carrots did better, but certainly not record-breaking.
At that point, I realized my son was overdue for getting up for school. He generally gets up with his alarm, but . . I ran back inside and rousted him. Back in the garden I finished up with carrots, put the shovel away, thought about the date for a minute (it's mid-September - shouldn't the sweet potatoes be ready?) and grabbed the shovel again.
Digging sweet potatoes is a chore in that the vines are so ridiculously abundant and it can be hard to remember exactly where I planted the roots. I eventually found the source of the vines and started digging a good 15 inches (37 cm?) away so I didn't chop any of them in half. A few minutes of digging revealed two large and 2-3 small ones, dark purple. I planted purple and orange this year.
I sprayed the whole basketful vigorously with the hose, then set them on the porch to drain. Maybe I should dig the beets, too? Hmm. These garden hods are worth their weight in gold; I love them. I wish I could dig clams some day!
I don't know if the carrot issue was with the variety or the company that sold them - anybody have any recs for reliable red or purple carrots?
Well. Many joyful and tasty roots. Happy fall, y'all!
I checked the two week forecast and it looks (fingers crossed) as if we’re not due for any more frost. Ergo I am going to plant some flower seeds outside this week, and I just planted the carrots with the ‘seed tape’ that I bought last month. It had about 22 linear feet of tissuepaper ‘tape’ inside with the seeds attached to it. I will reblog this when (if!?) I see germination and again when I harvest, to let you know how it performed.
[ID: image of a seed packet for rainbow carrots, Burpee kaleidoscope blend]
May 3, 2022
Ok! two months in from planting the seed tape. I had to do a slight thinning because there were a dozen or so carrots that were too close, but it was much better than what I get when I just direct sow carrot seed, so that’s a plus. Overall germination was good, with no bare spots in the planting.
These are the ones I thinned out. The purple ones show color up into the stem, so I was able to favor those and not thin any of them out, except for one sample. Other than that, though, this is random chance. I got 4 white, 5 orange (although some of the orange are pinker than others), and one yellow. No red, unless that one pink/orange one would deepen to red at maturity. Having nearly half my sample regular orange is dis-spiriting, compared to the picture on the seed package. I will probably be able to harvest by the end of the month, so I’ll give you full results then.
Eggplant/aubergine seedlings
#1, they are BABY!
#2, We should just totally throw out the word ‘eggplant’ and call them ‘aubergines’ in English, too, from now on. It is just such a delightful word.
I have had a lot of Crap going on lately, finance and business stuff for my (increasingly feeble) father, garden, Hero has a sore hoof, figuring out ‘distance learning’ for two different kids/schools. A lot of it makes me angry and /or frustrated, but wouldn’t make a very interesting post for y’all, so I’ve been quiet about it. Today I have an Aunt coming to visit from Annapolis, which is nice, and we’ll probably cook up a bunch of tomatoes into chili sauce.
So, anyway, here are a couple of farm&garden paintings that I did in years when I had more time and was less grumpy! I really enjoy painting veggie stilllifes, but they do not sell well in this area. The copper canisters were quite tricky!
[ID: First painting is a colander full of tomatoes with deep red chard, green beans, corn, and one green tomato arranged around it. Second painting is a group of yellow and green squash, large cucumbers, red tomatoes, and an onion arranged in front of a knife block and a trio of copper canisters.]
I’m more-or-less done canning for the season. I might can venison if we manage to do any deer hunting this year, but that’s about it. I maxed out the cabinet and put a fair number of jars in the pantry, too.
I usually want about twenty quarts of tomato sauce and twenty pints of salsa, but I didn’t get anywhere near that many. Out tomatoes grew but, boisterous vines but the (numerous) green tomatoes didn’t ripen well. At this point the vines are dead or nearly so, still full of green tomatoes. Disappointing. I don’t really need any more relish, so other than frying a few green ones I guess they will become chicken food.
I do have a few more things in the garden; one butternut squash that m-i-g-h-t ripen before the frost, a few bell peppers, some kale and chard. Maybe I’ll get some kale frozen next week.
Gardening is made harder by the presence of ***darned ambush predators. Lurking in the kale, no less. Isn’t kale supposed to be good for you? Not when somebody swipes at your hand when you’re picking it, it’s not!
On the other hand, I have friends working hard to help out - thank you bumblefriend!
I read your post and I'd like to help you get started. Please talk to me about how vegetables aren't real, because that sounds like an interesting af conversation.
Well let me tell you.
Everybody and their cousin has experienced the argument “is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable” at some point in their lives. It’s a fun bit of trivia, and let’s know-it-all’s speak condescendingly, or at least they did like 10 years ago. “Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad”. Whatever.
Which brings up the point, that botany and culinary sciences are very different. Botany is the study of plants, culinary is cooking and how things taste. Botany is science, and it has rules (kind of), where cuisine is full of guidelines that are completely cultural.
Tomatoes are a fruit. A fruit is how many plants have babies, and are made in the ovary of a flower. I have a diagram.
Armed with this knowledge we can know that tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, beans, peas and peppers are all fruit.
“Now”, I ask you, “what are lettuce, and cabbage, and spinach, and kale”?
“Vegetables”, you say, assuredly.
“Yes, but, what are they?”
“…vegetables”, you say, slower, and louder this time, not quite sure what I’m wanting from you.
No. They are leaves.
What are carrots, beets and radishes? Roots. What about celery and rhubarb? Stems. Potatoes? Tubers (food storage for the plant, and where new plant babies will grow from). Garlic and onions? Bulbs (also food storage). Mushrooms? They’re not even a plant, they’re a fungus, in the kingdom of fungi, which is somewhere between the plant and animal kingdoms.
“Vegetables” is just a word for plants that we eat, that doesn’t have enough sugar to be a fruit, and not enough flavour to be a herb or spice.
Botanically speaking, there is no such thing as a vegetable. They’re just different parts of a plant that happen to be edible.
There are other plants, normally considered weeds, that can be “eaten like a vegetable”. Dandelion, stinging nettle, dock, purslane, can all be cooked and eaten, making them vegetables, at least to the people to treat them as such. It’s all very cultural, and biased, and based on nothing but what people think it is. Therefore, they are not a real thing, it’s just a concept.
About a hundred years ago, ok, maybe 2005-ish, I used to get a magazine called Babybug (yes, published by the folks who do Cricket) that had a lovely little poem about this. I was so impressed by it, because it had stanza after stanza of really good rhymes about every part of a plant that we eat. The little bit I can remember is . .
“Celery, asparagus, what about them? We eat the stem! Peppers, green beans and okra are odd We eat the pod!
And do I end up mumbling bits and pieces of this poem as I’m gardening? Even all these years later? Yes, yes I do.
