What Became of the Flower Garden

The flower garden was a struggle for me this year.  I spread some wildflower seeds too early in the season and then didn't water them enough, so they never came up.  Then the bed was repeatedly overgrown with ragweed though I weeded sections of it when I could.  I ended up scattering a second round of seeds throughout the bed after one of my thorough weeding sessions and have been rewarded with a nice variety of colorful flowers in my yard.  I mulched the second sowing of seeds so that may have helped them stay moist enough to germinate even with my inconsistant watering of this bed.  I hope that these flowers have enough time to make seed before the first frost so I can continue seeing flowers here next year.

The Great Potato Harvest 2016

This year I grew two 3x10 foot beds of potatoes.  I planted three different varieties: Yukon Gold, Kennebec, and Purple Viking.  I started harvesting the yukon gold a few weeks ago by digging up one plant at a time and leaving the rest to grow more.  I decided to dig up all of the remaining potatoes in stages.  Almost all of the plants had died back and the beds were becoming overgrown with weeds from the mulch I used (rotting hay).  The first bed yielded the rest of the Yukon Golds and about half of the Kennebecs.  The second bed was dug up a couple weeks later and revealed a very decent sized harvest of the Purple Vikings and the other half of the Kennebecs.  I was plesantly surprised by the huge size of some of the potatoes.  Apparently the overgrowth of weeds in this bed didn't impact the harvest much at all.

Together both harvests filled two boxes that I had saved from canning peaches.

I would guess the total harvest is in the realm of 50-60 pounds without counting the potatoes that I have been eating along the way.  I will be keeping them in a closet in the coolest room in the house.  Hopefully this will keep me in potatoes until next spring if I'm lucky.  Depending on how long they last, I might try to grow three beds next year.

Salsa Season is Here!

This summer's heat loving vegetables took their time this year so I am only just starting to get enough tomatoes ripening at once to make a batch of salsa.  Until now I have been throwing the tomatoes that ripened here and there into the freezer so I can turn them into tomato sauce at my leisure.  The peppers have been taking their time as well, but I do have a few that are starting to change color, so I'm sure I will be able to harvest a good number of those soon.

Over the past couple of days I picked a number of good sized tomatoes as well as a decent amount of cherry tomatoes.

I sliced them into small chunks and started fill the pot with 10 cups of a variety of chopped tomatoes.

I then went out to the garden and picked out some of the less than perfect peppers that I could find.  Many of them had blemishes that I had to cut out, but I was able to find a small assortment of bell peppers for the salsa.

I removed the seeds and the stems and chopped them into small chunks then added them to the tomatoes in the pot.

 I love the variety of colors of the peppers.  It's going to make some pretty salsa!

Next I chopped up five cups of onions and added them to the pot.  I tried to use up as many of the tiny onions as a I could from my recent harvest, so it took quite a while to accomplish this step.

The last thing I added to the pot was two and a half cups of chopped jalepenos.  I picked a bunch a couple of weeks back and they have been patiently waiting in the fridge for all the other veggies to catch up.

To the main mix of veggies I added some apple cider vinegar, salt, cilantro and garlic, then put the whole thing on the stove to boil.  It made a very colorful mix once it was stirred well.

Once the mix boiled for ten minutes I transferred it into jars and put them in the canner for twenty five minutes.  The end product was beautiful and I ended up with a total of eight pints and a little left over for snacking.

As soon as they cool down they will moved to the pantry, though I'm not sure where they will fit on the shelves.  My pantry is getting very full this year and I'm loving it even though it's been a lot of work.

Colorful Peppers

The peppers have finally decided to start ripening and the colors peeking out of the patch are vibrant reds, oranges and purples. I am going to have some very colorful salsa on my shelves before the season is over.

 
Even the jalepenos are turning red!  They look like christmas ornaments hanging from the plants!

Since the peppers have been so prolific I plan on canning many jars of salsa this month.  Whatever is left after that will go into the freezer to be used as needed all winter long.  I love being able to have fresh frozen peppers on hand since they can be pretty pricey at the store and mine were frozen right off the plant so I know they are at their peak freshness.

Late Summer Garden Tour

I love how lush everything looks at this time of the year.  Everything is at full speed, the days are still warm, but getting shorter and all around the garden, the veggies are giving it their all until the frost comes.

At the front of the yard is the three sisters garden with corn towering high above the squash, and beans intertwined between the corn.

 I am very happy with the way this bed turned out.  The squash grew to fill in the walking spaces between the rows of corn, and the corn grew fast enough to support the beans for the most part. I think this a planting method that I will most likely use again for these crops.  I think it would even work well on a larger scale and it seems to be a really good way to grow some extra food for my chickens to eat.

The first row of the garden next to the corn holds the tomatoes.

These have grown well this year and they seem to have a lot of fruit growing on the vines, but they have been very slow to ripen.  I have been getting plenty of cherry tomatoes, but have only picked a handful of the larger varieties so far this summer.  I hope they start coming on soon, so I have a chance to make a few batches of salsa.  In the meantime I have been freezing the few that I haven't been able to eat and will make them into tomato sauce later in the fall when the weather cools.

Behind the tomatoes are the peppers.

The plants are vigorous and healthy, but not very tall.  They have also been very productive.  I have left many peppers on the plants to ripen into their final color and many of those are huge!  Some of the plants have been looking crowded with their peppers though, so I have picked at least a dozen green and purple peppers and froze them in halves to use with meals this winter.

The turnips and beets are behind the peppers.

This bed has also grown amazingly in a short time.  The turnips have already been thinned a couple of times and I have frozen a few quarts of those already.  The beets aren't quite big enough yet, but once the turnips aren't there to shade them so much, I think they will grow very quickly.

The cucumbers are behind the turnips and they are very happy!

This bed has been crawling with cucumbers for weeks and I have given up on trying to contain them.  At this point I am happy that they do such a good job as a ground cover that I don't have to worry about weeds in this bed.

Next to the cucumbers is the new cabbage patch.

I planted these guys after the garlic was harvested and they have done pretty well so far.  The ones in the middle just never came up, but I think 8 cabbage plants is plenty for me.  They are starting to form tiny heads in the middle, so I think I will get a nice crop from this bed this fall.

Next to the cabbage is the up and coming bed of lettuce and spinach.

It was the bed that held the onions just a few short weeks ago.  Since I have dug them all up I decided to see if I could grow myself some nice salad mix before it got too cold.  This bed may get a hoop house cover over it before the season is over and will hopefully keep me in salad into early winter.

The next bed over holds half of my potato crop for the year.  Right now it is horrendously overgrown with pasture because of the hay that I mulched the bed with, but beneath that I hope is hiding a treasure trove of red and purple potatoes.

The broccoli bed has gotten completely out of control also, though I am still harvest florets from some of the plants.  Other plants in the bed have a horrible infestation of aphids and I need to clean them out before they get worse.

The bush beans are still chugging along, though I have never gotten a huge harvest out of the bed, I have been able to freeze a few quarts of them here and there.

The summer squash is still happily producing and I am getting just enough to have fresh squash if I want it, or fill my dehydrator if I don't.

The brussel sprouts are also growing nicely and have started to form buds at the base of the leaves.  I think they should be a good size by the time the first frost comes.  I just hope they can avoid the aphids and cutworms that have been feasting on my broccoli in the bed nearby.

Next to the brussel sprouts is my up and coming bed of fall peas.  I harvested all the potatoes from this bed since the plants had mostly died back and am hoping that I can get a small crop of peas from this bed before the weather gets too cold.  If they don't have enough time to flower, then I will just turn the pea vines back into the soil to add nitrogen rich organic matter for the next crop.

Finally there is my strawberry patch on the side of the pine tree.  I finally had a chance to weed it again as it had been taken over by ragweed.  I was happy to find eight little strawberry plants holding their own in the shade of the pine.  Half of them have even sent out multiple runners, so this patch will only get bigger in time now that it is established.

At this point in the season I have to say that it's been a really great garden for it's first year.  I am looking forward to see how it grows for me next year.

Saving Sunflowers

The sunflowers have put on a beautiful display this summer, but many of them are nearing the end of their lifespan.  The giant sunflowers have bent over, pulled down by the weight of their seed laden flower heads.  Since the wild birds have been having a feast of the smaller sunflowers, I figured it was time to harvest the giant sunflowers and hang them to dry in a safe place that the wild birds couldn't get at.  I also harvested some of the smaller sunflowers and laid them to dry on a bench in the sun.  Many of them were already picked clean by the wild birds, but I took what I could.

The giant sunflowers heads were tied into bundles with wire and hung inside the large chicken coop out of reach of the current residents.  There is good air circulation, they are protected from rain and they are safe from the wild birds.  The plan is to give them to the chickens eventually as scratch in the winter, so I don't mind if I loose a few seeds to the chickens now as they are drying.

I think the giant flowers hanging from the ceiling add a bit of charm to the enclosure.  Hopefully I will be able to save some seeds for next year's crop so I can grow myself some more free chicken food.

Freezing Turnips

Turnips are one of those crops that no one really talks about.  You see them for sale in the grocery store, but rarely ever see anyone actually buy them.  Growing up in my house turnips were never on the menu, so I didn't even know what they tasted like or how to prepare them until last year.  I saw them in the store last fall and decided to get a couple to see if I even liked them.  I prepared them quite simply by peeling them and chopping them into chunks and boiling them until they were soft.  I thought they tasted a lot like the thick stems of broccoli and had that crisper texture like a kohlrabi.  I heard that the greens were edible too, but the ones at the store come with those chopped off, so I never got to try that part.

Since my second attempt at growing turnips was going so well, I have been able to start harvesting the roots as they get big enough.  Right now I am mostly thinning the largest turnips in the bed to leave more room for the smaller ones to grow.  I think I planted this crop about 6-8 weeks ago so it grows very fast and makes a good inbetween crop for an empty garden bed.  In the past week I was able to harvest about 10 good sized turnips and decided that I should preserve this harvest in the freezer.

I removed the tops and the roots of the plants and then peeled off the tough outer skin.  Then I sliced them into half inch chunks while I waited for a small pot of water to boil.

I blanched them in boiling water for a couple of minutes, then plunged them into an ice bath for a few minutes.

Once they were drained and dried for a few minutes I measured them into ziploc bags for freezing.  Each bag should be enough for a couple of portions for a meal.  This round of freezing gave me about 6 cups of turnips chunks, which I aldded to the 8 cups that I had frozen the week before.

When it was all said and done I decided to give the peels to the chickens for a special treat.  They love getting scraps from the garden and I love the fact that it's free food and entertainment for them.  I am doing anything I can to keep my feed costs down and the garden has a lot of excess right now so they get it all.

Pickle Overload

I think I may have gotten in over my head with my cucumber bed this year.  I planted 20 cucumber plants and they all are doing extremely well.

  I have been filling 6-8 gallon ziplocs a week for the past few weeks and I feel like I have been canning them non stop.  

This weekend alone I canned 21 more quarts of pickles.

  I have lost count of how many jars that I have made total, but I have given away at least 30 quarts and I still have somewhere in the realm of 40 quarts in my house.  Buying jars is becoming an expensive investment and I am contemplating feeding the cucumbers exclusively to the chickens for the rest of the season.  I am also running out of shelf space for all the pickles and am now resorting to storing them in their boxes in the back room.  I don't want to stack any on top of each other though, so I may need to invest in more shelves to hold all of my canned goods for the long run.

I may still give more away this holiday season so I will probably can a few more rounds before all is said and done.  I am hoping that I start getting jars back from the first round of giveaways, so I can reuse them instead of buying more jars.  I am definitely looking forward to the first frost for it will mean the end of picking and canning cucumbers for the year!  All in all this has been the best cucumber year that I have had yet, but the harvest has been exhausting!  I guess that means that I will have plenty of time to rest up this winter eating the bounty saved from summer.

Making Plum Wine

I have a love of sweet plum wine.  I had my first taste at a wonderful little sushi restaurant and the rest is history.  After moving to the mountains, I had a hard time finding a place that sold any.  I didn't have a hard time finding plums however, so I decided to make my own.  I had made a couple of small batches in the previous couple of years and everyone that tried it, loved it, so I decided that this year I should make more than a gallon of this variety of wine.  The only problem was that I didn't have the proper vessels for the six gallons that I wanted to make.  Luckily I had a friend that had both the primary and secondary fermentation tanks that I needed, and they weren't using them at the moment, so they lent them to me.


Now that I had the equipment, I could get the plums I needed to make the wine.....all thirty six pounds of them.  The majority of the plums came from the local farmer's market.  I bought out one happy vendor of all of her plums which were a beautiful yellow fleshed plum with sweet and juicy insides freshly picked that morning.

 The rest of the plums came from a friend that had a red plum tree that had just started ripening fruit.  I sliced all of the plums in half and removed the pits.  Then I cut them into chunks and threw them in the first fermentation bucket.  I mixed them with half of the sugar called for in the recipe then topped off the bucket with boiling water.

 After cooling down overnight I added the wine yeast, stirred it well and then covered it.  For the next week I stirred up the bucket twice a day to help break down the fruit and release it's juices.  Once the week was over, I strained off the wine into the final fermentation vessel - the glass carboy.  Here the wine will finish fermenting over the next few months.  I will add more sugar to the wine the next couple times I rack it to allow it to reach the sweetness level that I want.  Once it has cleared I will be able to bottle it.  I am looking forward to sharing this wine with friends and family over the coming year!

Turnips and Beets: Round Two

This year I tried my hand at growing a couple of new crops that I had never grown before: turnips and beets.  I had an "extra" garden bed that I didn't want to go to waste, so I filled in some of the extra space with a few short rows of turnips and beets.  Two things went wrong with this bed.  The first was that the drip irrigation that I installed for this bed didn't work very well, so the plants struggled under severe water stress.  The second thing was that I didn't bother pulling the weeds in this bed for a very long time, so it became very overgrown.  The weeds had gotten so bad that I didn't think that any of the turnips or the beets had survived.  The weeds did act as a living mulch for this bed however, and when I finally got around to pulling them I was pleasantly surprised to find that some beets and turnips actually did survive, though none of them had well developed roots yet.  Had I been better about keeping them watered and weeded, I probably would have gotten a good crop from both of them by now since they should grow fast enough to be harvested sixty days after they are planted.

Because they have such a short growing period I decided to give them another chance.  This time I used the bed that was occupied by peas in the spring.  Since this was another bed that had some watering issues, I made sure to add plenty of extra holes to my drip irrigation line here before I planted.  I used a shovel to lightly turn the bed to help break up the larger clods of soil and to make the surface soil fine enough to plant into.  I planted one side of the bed with turnips and the other with a variety of beets.  With the drip line working better, these seeds sprouted in no time and are well on their way to forming good sized roots for harvest.  The other thing that I tried to do in this second planting was to space my seeds out better.  The first round of seeds came up very crowded and I think they didn't grow well in part due to the fierce competition for space.  This time I tried to give a couple inches to each plant, and made sure to thin them while they were still small if they were still too close together.  This approach seems to be working out much better since the row of turnips is filling in nicely without looking crowded.  The beets were a little slower to get going, but their half of the bed is starting to fill in also.