Harvest Monday

Cherry tomato mix

Linking up with Harvest Monday, a great blog hop with gardeners around the world showing off their harvests. Lots of fun!

This week I finally had enough cherry tomatoes for both my Superior customers and our Globe-Miami Farmers Market.  I picked almost 10 pounds. I think next week will be even better. Next year I don't think I'm going to plant to tiny currant tomatoes. They just take way too long to pick. I am liking the Italian grape tomato call Pandorino. They are a nice size, good flavor and heavy producers, 8-10 fruit in a cluster. On the other hand I am not liking the Blue Cream from Baker's Creek. They are really splitting badly and don't want to come off the stem. I will not plant them next year. Besides I wasn't impressed with the flavor. I much prefer my old Snow White.

yellow scallop squash

This weeks squash harvest was only a little over 20 pounds.  I had a day when the plants wilted badly which reduced yields. But next week should be better as I've been trying to keep them more evenly watered. 

Black Tail Mountain Watermelons

Amazingly I have watermelons. So far nothing is bothering them so next summer I'm going to plant a lot more. I still have Hopi Yellow melons but they were planted later. They are new to me. I am thinking about covering my hoop houses in hardware cloth so I can plant cantaloupes in them next summer and actually get some!

Just hatched butterfly

Sunday morning I saw a just hatched butterfly.  I think it's a double swallowtail, our Arizona State butterfly

before

after

Also on Sunday I spent a little while cleaning a weedy corner.  There is still more to do but it was getting too hot. The little bit of green left on that bed is actually carrots.

dried basil

I also spent some time stripping leaves from dried herbs and putting them in bulk bags until I have time to put them in smaller ones and label them for sale. 

I picked some green and yellow snap beans but forgot to take a picture.  

Albino & Golden beets, small onions

I pulled some Albino and Golden beets. They grow a little slower than red ones so I try to plant them in their own beds. 

I also had a few very small onions. One of my lists said plant in January. I didn't think that was right but tried a few. Very tiny bulbs. So will stick with Sept/Oct plantings.

I picked flowers too, sunflower, yarrow, zinnia, marigold. I don't think I got a picture of them tho.

This weeks harvests:

6-28

Cherry tomatoes 1# 4oz

Beans.                  1# 14 oz

Scarlet Kale.         1# 0 oz

Squash.                 3# 8 oz

6-29

Scarlet kale.         1 # 4 oz

Lancinata kale      2# 7 oz

Belinda potatoes.  30 # 0 oz

6-30

Cherry tomatoes.   8 # 4 oz

Sage.                            2oz

Italian basil.                10 oz

Thai basil.                    10 oz

Flat parsley.                 10 oz 

Curly parsley.                8 oz

Lovage.                         4 oz

Squash.                   20# 8 oz 

Black Tail Mt. Watermelon 29# 0 oz

Carrots.                     1# 0 oz

Beets w/greens.        2# 0 oz

Small onions.            2# 0 oz

5 bunches flowers

Harvest Totals Week June 26-July 2
cherry tomatoes       9# 8 oz
beans                        1# 14 oz
Kale                          4# 7 oz
potatoes                   30# 0 oz
herbs                        2# 8 oz
watermelon             29# 0 oz
carrots                      1# 0 oz
beets                        2# 0 oz
onions                     2# 0 oz
TOTAL                82# 3 oz
Harvest totals do not include all the things I ate while I was working!

Farmer Friday: Potatoes & Squash

New Potatoes; White Creamers

All Blue potato

Yukon Gold

New Potatoes; almost 5 pounds

I love growing potatoes. They are a pretty easy crop, just remember that the new potatoes will grow above the piece that you planted. I try to plant mine about 9 inches deep and 9-12 inches apart depending on how big the plants will get. I have also grown potatoes in 5 gallon buckets. To do that I just put potting soil in the bottom third of the bucket and plant the seed potato. When it sprouts I add more soil, a little at a time, until the bucket is full. Keep it watered and when the plant dies back dump it out and pick up the potatoes. I usually get about 1-2 pounds from each bucket.

This year I didn't plant any buckets, I planted about 200 square feet of growing beds in potatoes. I planted All Red, All Blue, Yukon Gold, Belinda and White Creamers. Some take longer to finish than others, so I'll be digging potatoes for quite a while.

Biggest onion ever~ 1 # 8 oz

I grew a small bed of onions. In the past I haven't had the best luck with them since our soil is not the best. I was really impressed with the Barbossa and Granex varieties. I will plant a lot more this fall.

Baby Squash

Picked the first squash today; Gold Rush, Bennings Green Tint patty pan, yellow straight neck, Grey zucchini. Just a few were ready, but soon there will be a flood.

Flat & Curly Parsley, Lavender

Nanking cherries

I grew 9 Nanking cherry bushes from seed. They are 3 years old and fruiting. I'll be planting a lot more! They are a sweet / tart cherry and juicy, but not very big.

gopher snake getting a drink

close up gopher snake

I had something amazing happen one hot afternoon last week. I went to move the hose that was trickling on the squash plants and discovered this gopher snake getting a drink. Yep, it was actually drinking water right from the hose!

lambs quarters

A lot of lambs quarters are growing all over. Some people call them weeds, but they are actually good to  eat like spinach. And I feed a lot of them to the chickens.

Yep, as long as I have my garden!

Saving Seeds: Onions

With everything that went on July 4th and after (see my posts here) I forgot all about these guys. I save a lot of my own seeds for my garden. This picture is the seed head of an heirloom onion called Italian Red Bottleneck, which I obtained from the Seed Savers in Iowa. Each of the little bud like things was a small flower and now have several small black seeds in them.

You can see where one of the pods has split open, exposing the small black seeds. When a couple of pods have opened I go ahead and cut the whole stem and bring it into the house to finish drying out.

[edit]Which I did and now they are very dry and ready to clean, which hopefully I'll get to in the next day or so. In the meantime I will publish this post which should have been done back in July; don't know how it ended up still being a draft all this time....
I learned a lot about saving my own garden seeds from Carol Deppe's book, I think it should be on every gardeners reading list! She is a geneticist by training and a serious gardener. Her instructions are very easy to understand and implement in the garden.

Tally HO! And in the Kitchen August 1, 2009

Tally HO! And in the Kitchen

August 1, 2009 at 2:20 pm

WOWSERS! The tally for July is in and a big surprise!
Eggs, 102, which is down a bit from previous months. That isn’t really a surprise, since it has been so hot, the hens have been in a bit of a moult, which always lowers production.
alfalfa & comfrey, which I grow for the rabbits and chickens: 4.8 pounds
Produce: 101.75 That is the big surprise. The bulk of the poundage has been potatoes, tomatoes and onions, but includes strawberries, several kinds of beans, swiss chard, tomatillos, peppers, cucumbers, Tromboccino squash, eggplant, basil, apples, watermelon, mesquite beans [which will be ground into a flour when really crispy dry,  high in protien with a sweet lemon taste] and baby corn.
And there is more to come. It has been too hot for the lima beans to set pods, but as soon as it cools off a bit I think we’ll have lots, the cukes and yard long beans are just now hitting their stride. The baby corn is just coming in, to the girls delight [they've been waiting all summer for baby corn and are eating it raw!] The Kabocha squash will probably tote up a lot of poundage, there’s the yellow Moon & Stars and the Jubilee watermelons, the cantaloupes, a couple of kinds of pole beans, peppers and eggplants, to say nothing of the fact that there are still potatoes in their pots.  While it’s been too hot for the large paste tomatoes to set new fruit, once the daytime temps stay under 90, they should set a lot.
So it is quite possible for Aug and Sept to show even more poundage than July.
Each time I go to the grocery store my list gets shorter and shorter, partly due to the produce coming in from the garden. Part of it is because I am making more and more things from scratch at home. For instance milk was very cheap when I went shopping yesterday so I picked up an extra gallon and it is ‘ripening’ right now to make cottage cheese. I have found a really delicious brand of yogurt and while I am also going to begin making my own, especially when milk is cheap, it was on sale too so I got extra. The extra carton is now draining to make ‘yogurt cheese’. This is a soft and creamy spreadable ‘cheese’ to which I will add fresh herbs and eat on crackers.
Peelings, cores and bruised bits of apples sit in a gallon jar becoming vinegar. The cucumber crop is in various jars becoming fermented dill pickles. Scott eats tons of mayo so that is another one I’ll start making at home. He also loves garlic and I have a garlic mayo recipe to try out on him.
I’ve really been disappointed with BBQ sauce and salad dressings since I started really reading labels. Also with ketchup. They all have tons of corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup in them along with chemicals I can’t pronounce.  This makes most of them way too sweet and of course any non organic corn product is likely to be genetically modified, something I don’t want to eat. So I have been experimenting with making my own sauces. One really good one has been garlic & ginger. When I get it tweaked just right I’ll post it here.

Back to Basics July 26, 2009

Back to Basics

July 26, 2009 at 5:11 am

A lot of folks are getting back to basics these days. Around here that means pickle making, canning tomatoes, drying fruits, vegetables and herbs. It means making our own bisquick type mix for biscuits and pancakes, with 100% whole wheat flour, making 100% whole wheat noodles. It means trying to get rid of all the plastic in our life. This has been really hard to do. I didn’t realize how pervasive plastic is. For now I’ve stopped buying plastic wrap and just have reusable plastic containers. I also recycle anything I get from the store. I don’t usually use aluminum foil either.
Once upon a time I didn’t buy any household cleaners or paper towels and I’m going back to that again. I used baking soda instead of comet and diluted ammonia and vinegar for different things. I also made my own soap. I used paper grocery sacks instead of paper towels to drain bacon on and just used washable rags and dish towels for cleaning up instead of paper towels.
I have some different books that give recipes for different mixes which I’m going to be trying out. I used to make my own soup mix. When ever I had extra bits of celery, onions, carrots, etc. I’d dry them and put them in a jar. Then toss them in a couple of quarts of home canned chicken stock along with some rice or noodles and it was soup.
Way back when I could buy chicken for 25 CENTS ! a pound, I’d buy a dozen whole fryers, go home and cut them up for the freezer. I’d save all the necks, ribs, wings and tail pieces, boil them up with bay leaves, onions and garlic, then strain out the bones. Pick off the meat and put it back in, then can it all up in quart jars. If you have freezer space you can always freeze it.
There are a lot of little money saving things you can do every day. Learn to cook from scratch and skip all the packaged stuff. You will eat better food and save a lot of money.
The internet is a great resource; cruise around and you will find recipes for anything you want, soap, candles, snacks, crackers, breads, the list is endless.

Tally Ho! June 2009 July 13, 2009

Tally Ho! June 2009

July 13, 2009 at 12:26 am

I forgot to post the harvest numbers for June, so here they are:
Eggs: 104
Produce 24.37 pounds, lots of the small fruited tomatoes like Imur Prior Beta, Princepe Borhese, Yellow Marble, Snow White, Red Currant and Yellow Pear, some potatoes, Yukon Gold, Purple Peruvian, Red LaSoda. Green onions, lambs quarters, chard, a pound of wheat, some purple beans, some herbs of different sorts, a couple of Black Beauty eggplants.
Alfalfa & Comfrey for the rabbits and chickens, 2.3 pounds fresh wet weight.
Just a glance at the numbers for July, I think we are already close to the total for June, so the total should be a lot bigger this month. While the small fruited tomatoes continue to come in, the big paste tomatoes are coloring up. I’ve harvested the white storage onions, and they are curing now. There’s more potatoes to come and more little purple and yellow beans coming on. Oh and don’t forget the cukes! They are just getting started.
Even though it’s 100+ degrees this week, it’s time to start thinking about the fall garden and what we want to grow during the cool season. I’ve already made a list and soon it will be time to start the seeds.
So How’s your garden growing? Are you free of the grocery store yet? Beat the high price of food by growing your own!