Battery is here and I'm back in the photo business

Over the next few posts I'll be playing catch up. First, a few shots of what is munching on my potato plant leaves. I've been pulling these little striped buggers off (immediately below) for a few weeks now. Today is the first time I've seen these little red and black things (second below), who I quite obviously interrupted having lunch! Are either of these a "potato bug"? I need to research what to do about it...

Here's my first eggplant, which is doing great, and has grown REALLY fast. A few days ago this was only the size of the first segment of my thumb. Note the lacy-looking leaves. I haven't been able to catch anyone eating it yet.

And the best news - My first harvest. The first picture is of turnips just pulled last weekend. Below that is what's currently in my bottom produce drawer in the fridge - clockwise from the top, Daikon, red beets and turnips. We've got some eating to do!

Turnipaloosa!

Well, actually it's a radishapoloosa around here, but turnipaloosa flows so much better!

I have harvested one mound's worth of Daikon and one mound's worth of turnips over the past few days - they are cleaned and trimmed and in dated Ziploc bags in my bottom produce drawer. There's a lot - but based on my experience last fall I have about a month to do something with them all. So I've been researching what that "something" might be. Tonight's veggie dish - rainbow chard, leeks (both locally bought organic produce) and (my) daikon casserole in a thick, yummy cheese sauce. It's in a loaf pan in the toaster oven (I'm trying not to heat up the house with the big oven, now that the summer is here). I just took a taste, and it promises to be YUMMY! I cut the daikon very thin and sprinkled about a teaspoon of salt over them and let them sit for a few hours. That pulls most of the moisture out of them. They were actually quite palatable to me raw after that. It kind of tones down the spice. I suspect that in this killer sauce I made (with parmesian and feta) I won't even know I'm eating radishes.

The elephant in the room here, of course, is that it's only the 9th of June and I have two empty mounds; when I get the rest of the turnips and radishes, not to mention all those beets in the next week or two, I will have even more empty mounds...hmmm...what to do? I did some research about this this weekend and it seems that beans and squash are good crops to alternate in the same spot as turnips and beets (from which I extrapolated radishes....we'll see). So after work today I worked in some of the new bag of compost manure that I bought on Sunday, and planted some of the yellow crookneck squash in those two mounds. Hopefully that will do well. If the zucchini, cucumbers and melons are any indication, they will.

I also staked up my cucumbers today, and used some strips of old hose for the time being to get them growing up the poles. I also had to put a new stake off to the side of one of my tomato cages, because the plant is just getting HUGE and one of the branches was both dragging the ground and seemed to be breaking off the main stalk. I'm REALLY missing the camera for this comment...

What else? What else?

I'm starting to get a lot of little tomatoes. Something is eating my Ichiban eggplant leaves (they look like lace, though the plant generally looks healthy), and something is munching on the leaves of one of my cucumbers (I'm guessing from reading the other blogs that it might be slugs), which is why I decided to stake and train them up. I covered the split zuchinni vine with dirt and also used a smaller hooked stake to kind of lift it up off the ground a little bit and support it. I started to weed around the inside perimeter of the fence, which is just getting overgrown with grass and weeds. Uncovered a big black spider that scampered back down into a hole in the dirt. Yuck!

I still have weeds coming up through my straw. I think I need more straw. I have to admit that I love straw now.

Oh, and I potted cilantro, oregano and thyme that I bought at Lowe's last night.

All of which is to say, things are really hopping, and there's something to tend to every day. And in the evenings? Start planning the fall garden, of course!

Quick update...

I had second thoughts about the landscape fabric in the potato cages - I went back out there this past weekend and pulled it all out. I got another bale of hay and put hay around the inside edges and on top instead. The dirt seems to be holding up so I think they'll be okay.

Curiousity got the better of me with the potatos, and I went feeling around inside one of those mounds while I was out there. Sure enough I found a few little potatoes - TINY - like the size of a grape or smaller. Wow. I pulled my hand out and patted the dirt back down again.

I put the six crookneck yellow squash in pots on the deck. Some of them look better than others. My zucchini in the garden are huge; the one in the pot is looking pretty spindly. I don't think it's going to make it.

Basil is coming up nicely.

The one pot I planted with my last few snap pea seeds is just burgeoning. They are climbing right up the cage I made for it. Can't wait to post a picture of that. I think I need to top off the potting soil in all the pots on the deck.

I have a huge mandarin pepper, a huge anaheim, a huge carmen, and about 4 serrano peppers that all look like the right size, I think I'm just waiting for them all to turn color (orange or red) to harvest. (Cindy, is that right?) My mini red bell pepper has peppers all over it. The biggest one is showing signs of turning red.

I have a little eggplant forming about the size of the tip of my finger.

Can wait till the camera battery arrives!!!!

What's for Dinner

Well, my camera battery (both of them) has officially permanently died on me and won’t hold a charge, so until the replacement arrives (about a week) I’ll be going exclusively verbal. Sorry about that.

This past week I have gotten serious about thinning the beets. Last fall they didn’t do well and it’s because I never thinned them so I never even got one that fully developed, though they all started out as nice robust plants and should have been a nice little crop. As they’ve gotten bigger it’s getting easier to see which smaller ones are growing practically on top of which bigger ones (when they’re little it’s hard to even distinguish between two plants, to me). So I’ve been out there actively thinning, and I think with the red beets at least I’ve got them all about 3 – 4 inches apart now so hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll start harvesting red beets. The gold ones will come in a few weeks after that.

I brought in all the beet greens to eat – a first for me. I have a photo of the bowl full – it was a lot – but I can’t get it out of my camera! I cleaned them all, and cut off the stems, and then over the course of two nights I ate them for dinner. I sautéed some raw garlic in olive oil and then threw in the chopped greens to wilt. When they did, I squeezed a wedge of lemon over them, salted them, and mixed in some white beans and cooked brown rice for a meal. DELICIOUS! On the second night I also threw in some Cajun sausage. It was really good.

I polished off my first Daikon over the course of a couple of salads, and pulled myself up another today. Again, it’s not huge, but I want to make sure I eat them, so I’m going to keep pulling them up as I use them. Anyone have a good recipe for Daikon?

I pulled up four beautiful, perfectly shaped, medium-sized turnips yesterday (again, photo stuck in camera). They are trimmed and washed and in my produce drawer. Tonight’s dinner will be roasted root veggies – turnips, rutabaga, red and gold beets, banana fingerling potatoes and sweet potato. Roast in olive oil, maybe with a dash of cayenne pepper, and when they’re crispy pull them out, squeeze with lemon and dust with freshly chopped cilantro. Tonight only the turnips will be mine, but at some point I’ll be able to make this dish entirely out of the garden (minus the rutabaga, which I didn’t plant…)

Split zucchini stem and burgeoning babies

One of my zucchini stems is splitting...is this a problem?


The melons are getting big!

Here's two beautiful baby cukes!

And the piece de resistance - I harvested my first radish tonight! I had it on a salad for dinner. Delicious!

My Final Thought For May

My final thought for this weekend, and for the month is this: This time last year I was thinking gosh, I wonder if it’s too late to plant a garden? And this year? A sense of great satisfaction and accomplishment...Ahhhhh!!!!

Hay Part Two and Some Beautiful Moments

My eggplant has put out a beautiful purple bloom. I first discovered how beautiful a blooming eggplant is last year. I just love it.

Well, after getting half the garden covered with hay (that bale doggone near did half the garden) I thought wow, this is great. I had already worked up a sweat working that hoe on all my weeds before putting the hay down – I thought, maybe I won’t have to do that anymore.

And they hay covered half looked like – well – a working garden. I’m starting to think that all of a sudden, I’m going to have a lot of food on my hands! The marigold that I thought died didn’t – it’s just taking a break. I was going to replant that mound; now what the heck am I going to do with 6 little crookneck squash plants? I’m thinking I need more potting soil, and I need to haul more pots up onto the deck.

I fed the heirloom tomatoes, which are getting HUGE, and I fed the topsy turvey, which already has a nice tomato on it.

The melons look great. I have thinned them some. Last year I had 5 plants and as much as I could eat for a few months there, so I’m going to have cantaloupes to spare, I think. The cucumbers are thriving, as are the zucchini. I’m very glad that my ignorance and carelessness didn’t kill them off.

My radish greens are gigantic, and I expect they’re busy forming nice big roots. My red beets are doing great, and so are the yellow (pictured).

One of my nasturtium is finally blooming!!!!!

I felt so good after checking all this out, that I went back and got a second bale of hay! This time I lined the trunk with trash bags. I also ordered myself a special treat – The Backyard Homestead, a Mother Earth News Book. Because I think that in the not so distant future I’m going to have to get on with my summer project of learning to preserve food. I’m really trying to get my husband to agree to a couple of chickens……