Harvest Monday April 29, 2013

Today’s post is mostly about the cooking.  Whilst I harvested salad greens and we ate the odd strawberry here and there, it has been a sparse harvest when judged by volume. But not flavor–oh no, not flavor.

A few years ago my mother and I drove out to East Texas to Blue Moon Gardens, a beautiful garden center in the middle of nowhere.  They had so many different types of rosemary and I went from one to the next, rubbing, sniffing. It’s interesting how different some of them were. Some of them had a fragrance that smelled almost like pine or some other room spray, but one had an aroma that was savory, that just smelled like something I wanted to eat.

I promptly bought it and forgot which one it was.

That’s the one I used on my rosemary turkey breast yesterday.

Along with the peel/zest of one lemon, salt and pepper, Greek seasoning, all held together by a blend of soft butter and Lebanese olive oil.

It was fantastic.

A couple of weeks ago Norma asked me about my red lettuce. It’s called Red Sails. Here it is after a recent rain.

It’s really flourishing and I quite love it.

Finally, in order to get in closer to my beds and free up some room for my container growth, I cut back the Old Blush triffid that would take over the back yard if I allowed it. It will survive. It will be covered with the same gorgeous pink next spring, although hopefully smaller, as I did a very drastic hair cut. Now I just need somebody with a chainsaw to get after the dead under growth I exposed.

BEFORE: April 22, 2013

AFTER the carnage: April 27, 2013

We ate breakfast at Garden Cafe again. Their gardens, as always, are inspirational to me. Check out their bed o’ greens.

See what gardeners are harvesting around the world at daphne’s dandelions. Add your pictures, too, if you have some!

Harvest Monday 4-22-13

I am not a girly-girl. So why did I join the Sally Beauty Supply club this morning? Why was I even in there? Because when none of my sprayers worked and I wanted a small one to spray soapy water on aphids, I went looking online for sprayers and to my surprise, found that Sally’s has a wide variety for cheap. Not surprising, really. But once I got in there, oh my. More little goodies than I can begin to describe, for gardeners, travelers, all sorts of people not necessarily interested in beauty supplies.

9 oz bottles in various colors, around $2.40 each if you join the club, still under $3 if you don’t. Sweet!

I got two. One for foliar spray and one for my Dr Bronner’s soap spray.  I’ll probably end up with a larger one for foliar, though.

Not much else to say today.  Harvest same as before, some salad greens, some herbs, and I continue to work in the garden and enjoy it. I bought a tomato plant that was about 3 feet tall and already had ‘maters on it. Caddo tomatoes, never heard of them. Decided to nab it and see how it does, so I actually have tomatoes ripening in the garden! (Cheating, much?)

Oh. And I’ve been seeing bees. Good times.

April 22, 2013

See what gardeners are harvesting around the world at daphne’s dandelions. Add your pictures, too, if you have some!

Harvest Monday 4-15-13

See what gardeners are harvesting around the world at daphne’s dandelions. Add your pictures, too, if you have some!

This week I harvested several salads which were DELICIOUS. I’ve said it before. It’s impossible to imagine how wonderful various greens taste right out of the garden. For example, when we were shopping at North Haven Gardens back in early March one of the guys told us that they had a kale that was so delicious raw–he went on about it the way people go on about coffee or wine, and I thought, okay, so there are even kale aficionados? Weirdo.

But then he pinched off a small leaf and told me to try it. Because at North Haven Gardens they don’t spray their stuff with chemicals so it’s safe to pinch and taste anything (that is edible, anyway). And to satisfy him, I said, “Erm, sure!” Very brightly. You know, the way you talk to somebody who is not quite on this planet and you are humoring them whilst wondering how quickly you can move on without offending.

OMG.

YOU HAVE TO TASTE THIS KALE.

Seriously, I found the Resident Storm Chaser and said, “You have to try this,” while the weirdo culinary genius stood by, smiling.

RSC gave me a subtle dirty look, the too-polite-to-refuse-in-front-of-strangers but I’m-going-to-get-you kind of look. And he gave the obligatory couple of chews and then his expression changed. “That’s really good,” he said.

Not much to look at, but tasty!

We bought two.  I don’t know how to describe them, except kind of… rich? Mellow? Not sharp and hot and spicy like mustard greens, but more like a very rich, buttery, slightly sweet broccoli? [OMG I am a weirdo, I am discussing kale like it's a fine wine.]

Now I’m thinking I need to get these Nero Di Toscana Kale seeds this fall and grow more.  At first I figured only the tender new baby leaves were tasty, but I was wrong. These are tender and tasty even at full size. I have loved adding them to salads but I rarely am outside working that I don’t pinch one and eat it, and the main reason I don’t do that more often is because I wouldn’t have any left. Thus my desire to plant more.

So, last week I decided to make an omelet with fresh stuff out of the garden. I still had some small leeks so I sliced one. I took small leaves from swiss chard, from spinach, from the kale. I pinched some thyme and some chives and some oregano–I dunno, just this and that. I had a tiny carrot remaining from an earlier harvest which I shaved thin, then minced the herbs and mixed together and…

I was in the mood for a fried egg.

Not an omelet.

But I had all the stuff ready for the omelet.

But I wanted a fried egg.

So I sauteed all the veg and herb in butter, then cracked in the egg.

My grandmother’s ancient 8-inch iron skillet.

Then, because I didn’t want to flip it, after it sizzled a bit I got a palm-full of water and sprinkled it around the edges of the skillet and put a lid on it and waited a minute or so. The resulting steam finishes off the top of the egg.

Perfection!

I have a feeling that the dish I “invented” which is an egg fried with veg and herbs probably exists already. If it does, let me know the name.

The only thing I would do different is have more savoury flavor. I would add onion or garlic, I think, because there wasn’t enough leek to give it that bit of sumpn-sumpn I wanted. Or maybe some bell pepper. Or even just go heavier with the herbs. Just a bit more flavor.  Because the kale was so mild, it didn’t add a lot.

But it turned out great and gave me exactly what I wanted. That rich, buttery runny yolk stirred around with all the fresh stuff from the garden was delicious!

Delicious!

If I didn’t do anything but use it on sandwiches, lettuce would be more than worth its keep. Just think of all the money we save by never having to buy lettuce. We’ve been pinching off leaves since the day we put it in the ground and look how pretty it is. For some reason the red lettuce did better than the green, but the green is starting to catch up now. These were bedding plants we bought at North Haven Gardens the same day we bought the kale.

To my total shame, I broke my rule about buying things made in China. I bought this little hummer at Home Depot. I was weak. I admit it. But they were so pretty. [I bought three.] And I am ashamed but hey, human. Moving on, the dwarf snaps are to draw pollinators. I probably won’t leave them in once the initial burst of blooms is over. Last year I had trouble with pollination so this year I decided to stick flowers around here and there hoping to remedy that until my herbs start blooming.

And finally–Friday morning I am almost certain I saw a hummingbird. A real, living one. Either that or some sort of largish insect that was rather locust-looking, which I am pretty sure it couldn’t have been. It zipped around from a snapdragon over to the rosebush.

Very early. And today we will hit 90 degrees.

Summer is coming, people.

Brace yourselves.

April 15, 2013 – when the Old Blush monster rose stops showing off we will whack her back again. Last year we had to cut her back to half her size to put in these square foot garden beds. She covered the ground all the way to the sidewalk, where the smaller bed is now on the left! Oh, these antique roses. They are hardy! But we need the space for more beds.

Harvest Monday 4-8-2013

The garden is taking off, yay! Provider bush beans (whatever they are) are blooming, even! Got lots of brocco-bits this week, some bitty carrots, lettuce and greens, the same yadda yadda as recently. Also the largest cauliflower we had (8 oz, not exactly huge).

We have learned that a bit of broccoli snapped right off the plant and eaten, or cauliflower just harvested, each have a bit of sweetness that never makes it to the grocery store. Yum.

Herb tea with a sprig of lemon thyme.

My beginnings in gardening are largely owed to listening the Howard Garrett, the Dirt Doctor, on the radio for years and years. [I just googled him for links and it won't surprise many of you that the words "controversial" and "organic" showed up right away.] One of his regular habits is to describe his day’s herb tea. (Herb with an “h” if you want the true Garrett experience.)  He pinches a bit of this and a bit of that and puts it in his mug, adds hot water–herb tea.

I pinched some lemon balm, some lemon thyme, spearmint, and I forget what else. Those were the main things. And made the Resident Storm Chaser a cup of herb tea.  Will continue to experiment, but this was nice.

He doesn’t drink coffee because he found out by trial and error that it raises his cholesterol and makes his arthritis hurt.  Giving it up and watching the cholesterol come down and feeling the pains go away was a very mixed blessing for him, because he enjoys hot drinks and had gotten used to coffee. He loves hot tea, too.

Leeks

Next year I will definitely plant more leeks, more broccoli, more cauliflower, and lots more carrots because this year what we had was delicious, just not enough.  I’ll probably try brussell sprouts again because I love them, but they got eaten up by something this year. Or had some sort of fungus on them. Or something.

Cauliflower & broccoli-bits

There’s a local chef who gardens and puts his experiences on youtube. Found him: Brandon Marshall. He’s had some outstanding brassicas (cauliflowers, broccs, sprouts) so I have hopes that we’ll figure out the way to do the same. I was told at the nursery that our fall was so dry and hot, it’s why the winter garden didn’t do anything. You mean it wasn’t my fault? Score! Except Brandon Marshall managed to make his work fine. (Oh well.)

Trellis 4-8-2013

In other news, I didn’t show a pic a couple of weeks ago when the RSC built me a trellis to grow stuff on. Nor did I show the snap pea plants that I bought to grow up the trellis.  Most of them abandoned hope and croaked but a couple survived.

Fence posts with coated chicken wire nailed to them. Green-coated because I don’t like the look of aluminum, so, sue me. Plus we already had it.

I saved some acorn squash seeds from an organic acorn squash and they are already growing, though. And yesterday I planted some spaghetti squash seeds I liberated from their fleshy prison (which was quite tasty steamed with butter).

Garden 4-8-2013

See what other gardeners are harvesting around the world at daphne’s dandelions. Add your pictures, too, if you have some!

What’s the weather like where you are? Things growing? Dying? Frozen? Burned to a crisp? Do tell!

Go see other growing stuffs at daphne’s dandelions!

Harvest Monday 3-25-13

Not a lot this week.

I mentioned last week that I had a farm on the kitchen countertop. Others have written about finding coir not a great starting medium for seeds. If I had done some in coir and some in some other soil I could compare but I didn’t so I can’t. The seedlings are still growing and still green so at least there’s that. We’re in the midst of a cold snap–maybe the last this year? Dipped below freezing last night so I had to cover tender stuff outside and obviously haven’t been able to start putting these tender babies out. Maybe next week I can start hardening them off for the shift.

It would have been nice to have carrots or broccoli from the garden for Easter. As it is, we’ll have… cabbage. Yes, I have a couple of small heads of cabbage that I’ll harvest later this week. Pose them for their closeups, weigh them, then do something delicious with them.

In the meantime, we continue to enjoy the “bounty.” Even these bits and drabs from the garden are delicious, so much better than anything we buy at the store. We enjoy every bite.  Broc bits and carrots for tonight. I’m going to chop them, then sautee with butter and some chopped shallots. Yum.

In case you’re wondering, yes I am still bouncing. I am still waiting. I am still forced to keep my lips zipped. And it is killing me.

Go see other growing stuffs at daphne’s dandelions!

Harvest Monday 3-18-13

Welcome to harvest monday! I have a couple of gardening questions so I’m glad you came. Also I have a wordpress question. Does anybody who uses wordpress on their own site (rather than the free wordpress) have a widget that notifies commenters when you respond? Because when I respond to comments, commenters don’t know it unless they come back to check, and that kind of sucks.)

Onward. GARDEN!

I have been transplanting seedlings. My kitchen farm is messy but is working. The problem is, once I got all the seedlings transplanted, I didn’t have room for them all under the light.  I put the overflow under the eave of the house outside where they won’t ever get any direct sunlight but plenty of “bright” and am hoping they don’t suffer.  It’s not hot yet, but if you think I should, I’ll bring them back in and just be diligent about rotating stuff under the lights. This picture doesn’t show all of them. I snapped it while I was still in the middle of transplanting.

Also, in Department Fail, I lost track of which transplants are Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, and Roma.  So some are marked but many aren’t. Oh, well!

Last week I planted several tomato bedding plants that are much further along than these babies. I’m hoping that this summer will help me determine whether starting them from seedlings is as productive as buying bedding plants. Also, next year will start seedlings much earlier, and probably get a second growlight, though my kitchen may protest.

If you’re curious, I used this video to learn how to transplant and this is why I transplanted when the seedlings are so tiny.  I decided I waited too long last year.  Each of my seedlings was an inch or two long with small leaves on top, and now the stems are in soil so they can sprout roots, too. Hope it wasn’t too soon.

This week’s actual harvest.  We got about 5 ounces of carrots that now are actually carrot-sized but the carrot seeds I planted in early February are doing so little, I doubt if I will get anything from them before it’s too hot. I say that not really knowing when it gets too hot for carrots, but just knowing they are cool-weather crops and Dallas doesn’t stay cool that long. Opinions?

This morning I steamed some organic carrots that I bought at Whole Foods Market and have stuck one of them in soil to grow. But does this really work? Will it grow a new carrot, or just greens out of the top?

I also made a quick trip through the garden and pinched off some greens of various sorts, a small sweet red pepper from the fridge, and some green onion tops to put in a scrambled egg. It turned out very nicely, though next time I’ll also add onion. The pepper didn’t add quite enough flavor for my tastebuds.  Also, I am wondering if I plant the pepper seeds, will all the peppers be red or will they be a mix of red, yellow and orange like the package they came out of? Hmmm.

My goal this summer is to have so many tomatoes and so much squash I have to freeze a whole lot of it. If all my tomato seedlings take off I’m sure I’ll be giving some away, but that remains to be seen.  Maybe I’ll even have to dry some of the tomatoes in a dehydrator! (I remember how many tomatoes Barbara Kingsolver had in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life–a book I can’t recommend highly enough, especially for those of you who are gardening!)

As always, you can see more harvests from around the world by checking out the others hosted at daphne’s dandelions.

Harvest Monday 3-11-13

I only harvested a handful of broc-bits and itsy bitsy carrots this week. Oh yeah, some salad greens. I know this is boring to hear or read people say again and again, but dang! It’s unbelievable how good various greens taste raw when they’re fresh out of the garden. Toss in some finely chopped fresh herbs and it’s scrumptious.

But you know that.

Sad, pitiful broc plant.

I have a really sad broc that has been eaten by something and I keep thinking I should trash it, but I keep getting little broclets from it. So I get my handful or more of brocs from it and then leave it. I’ll pull it out when I have something else to put in the fabric pot, I guess.

Happy broccoli.

Oh, and because that’s not only sad but also embarrassing? Let me show you the broccoli that’s not sad and pitiful.

Broc bits.

Because you came to see pictures of the actual harvest, I have this bad picture of broccoli-bits in my hand. I was holding the iPod with one hand and broccoli in the other so yeah, not so focused.

Can you spot the tomato?

Oh, and I mentioned carrots, didn’t I? Okay, I have this big pot that I planted carrot seeds in last fall without thinning them out. They were small and scraggly as you can guess.  I have pretty much thinned them now and am letting the remaining ones grow until they get bigger. In the meantime, yesterday I planted a tomato plant in the middle of the carrots on the assumption that they will be long gone before that tomato is big enough for it to be a problem. But I did have to pull some bitty carrots out of the middle to make room.

And finally, the bits of broc and carrot along with some cabbage and shallots cooked in butter until crunchy. Not a lot but it was yummy.

I’m going to take advantage of the fact that you clicked through by asking questions and hoping to get answers!

In my dream of backyard “farming” (three square-foot raised beds) I needed a small freezer to hold all the excess squash I’d be unable to even give away, and loving all that wonderful squash during the winter.  Well, I only got enough for us to enjoy some very nice meals, but no extra to give away or freeze. Hopefully this year will go better.

I also have this dream of needing a Excalibur 3500B 5 Tray Deluxe Dehydrator.

But I don’t eat much (if any) dried food and am not sure if I will get enough of any kind of appropriate harvest to use it or actually eat whatever dried stuff I end up with and so fear it would be a waste of money and (possibly worse) space. Do you have a dehydrator? Do you use it?

The garden on Saturday, March 9, 2013

As always, you can see more harvests from around the world by checking out the others hosted at daphne’s dandelions.

Harvest Monday 2-11-13

What a mixed bag on Harvest Monday! As always, you can see more harvests from around the world by checking out the others hosted at daphne’s dandelions.

In case you missed it, we did have a butterfly emerge in the house, though we still haven’t found the chrysalis. Last Friday we took it to the Texas Discovery Gardens at Fair Park in Dallas to be released in their butterfly house. This was our list pic before leaving.

I hope it has a long and happy life, and once again thank the fabulous Garden Cafe for their commitment to local foods, organics and delicious menu for giving us this unexpected gift when they sold us a sprig of dill and a sprig of mint a few weeks ago.

The mint rooted and is now in a pretty pot on the patio, waiting to fulfill all my many mint needs!

As for the rest of the news in the garden, I did get harvest:

I never thinned my carrots last fall so yesterday I pulled about half of them and replanted the teensiest ones. I don’t know if they’ll continue to grow. Time will tell. Also found one round radish, one teensy-teensy cauliflower and snipped some red and green mustards.

Friday I spent a number of hours getting our largest raised bed ready and planted various seeds, as you can see below:

And then to make sure (and also rush the season) we bought some lettuce, kale, and other plants which I added yesterday.

It’s such a glorious time of year. It has been almost one year since we started this experiment in backyard farming, and it has been the most fun ever, not to mention, fascinating and rewarding. For every failure we’ve had a success, even if it’s small. We are learning all the time and will be reaping the benefits for years to come, I hope.

This week I stumbled across references to a couple of books that looked like they might be good, but the reviews are more mixed (and the negatives more heavily weighted) than I like to see. Has anyone read either of these? Thumbs up or down? And I Shall Have Some Peace There: Trading in the Fast Lane for My Own Dirt Road and The Backyard Parables: Lessons on Gardening, and Life by Margaret Roach.

Tell me how your garden is growing! Or not. Or what you’ve eaten good lately. Yum, I am making myself hungry now.

Oh! Em! Gee!

Previously, on planetpooks…

Remember the Harvest Monday gift I shared, the caterpillar we brought home from Garden Cafe (as a teensy egg on some organic dill weed I bought from their garden)?

It disappeared. We assumed (hoped) it had formed a chrysalis, but we never found it. Still haven’t found it.

But look what I did find this morning at 5:30 a.m. when I was struggling with the coffee maker?

Of course there is not a blooming plant around and we aren’t past freeze risks, so for now it lives in a plastic box with air holes and a bit of agave nectar, and we will be taking it to the butterfly garden at Fair Park.

Harvest Monday 1-28-13

Harvest! Foods! On the table, even!

From the garden: some mustard greens (red and green), carrots (about as long as my fingers), some teensy broccoli heads (why do my broccoli plants only make teensy heads?) and some thyme.

And here the greens and one of the carrots are on the Resident Storm Chaser’s breakfast plate.

Scarlet Nantes carrots. Why don’t they have scarlet centers?

Yes, he eats veggies for breakfast. Weird? No, weird is naming veggies after pixie body parts.

Oh. Wait. Speaking of…

Fall/winter garden has been another “learning” experience.  I planted a number of brassicas. The brussels sprouts have done nothing. Where is the stalk that has little leprechaun brains on it? (That is why the Resident Storm Chaser called them to tempt the little nippers into eating them. Not that it worked, mind you. But I love that guy and now you know why.)

I love crunching down on leprechaun brains brussels sprouts that have been steamed lightly and then sauteed in butter and garlic, yum.

I don’t know if they are aware of their future and just aren’t going to grow for me this year or whether there is still time for them to pop up.  Anybody in North Texas know the score?

Orange-sized. And it doesn’t have the pointy-topped shape that the picture on the tag showed, yet. It’s still round.

But we can haz cauliflower! Romanesco and white. One of the Romanescos is the size of a large-ish orange. I’m watching it daily, trying to figure out when to harvest. The others are all the size of leprechaun brains brussels sprouts, oddly enough. And I’m not quite sure when to know it’s time to harvest, whether it’s possible that (like the damned broccoli) they may be tiny shrimpy things that need to be harvested now before they bloom or whether they will keep getting bigger. Advice? [These pics were taken with my iPod Touch and are glarey. I need to start using my camera again.]

And the cabbage may finally be ready to form heads. Not the red cabbage. It has just gone pffth! at me and is scraggly and doing nothing. But I have several green cabbages that may be forming heads now. Hard to tell from the picture but the very center seems to be getting smaller and tighter.

What’s going on in your garden? On your kitchen windowsill? Tell me in comments or give me a link to your harvest post. See other harvests at daphne’s dandelions!

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