I’ve got the gardening itch, but the only thing that really continues to grow outside is kale. I found this recipe for crispy kale via notmartha.org.
It was delicious. If I still followed the Atkins Diet, this dish would be my potato chip substitute. The only change I would make is to wait until minute 14 to start checking for crispiness if you have a large amount of kale. It really shrinks up in the oven.
If you’re going to keep a blog, you really need to keep up with it. I make a mental list of things to blog about, take pictures at that event, and remind myself to blog about the event. After time the event stagnates in my head, but the first thing in my mental queue has to be kicked out before I can even think about writing the next one.
Now is the time for a reboot! I’m just going to clear out the queue and start from what happened yesterday.
Since I’m a knitter, I have a number of cold weather scarves. Scarves are easily lost during the season to the bottom of the coat rack. The solution is to create an individual hook.
I buy a lot of 3M Command hooks. You can apply the adhesive strips to almost any surface, and they hold up to 3 lbs. The smaller strips hold less. Each package comes with a few extra adhesive strips, so I thought it would be fun to use them up.
It occurred to me that a spool would make a good hook because the white plastic spool seems to be made out of the same material as the hooks. I would never put a heavy jacket on the spool because it just isn’t engineered to distribute the weight correctly.
In other news, it has warmed a little outside. Despite the warm weather, there are no asparagus shoots coming up yet. I did find a volunteer spinach plant yesterday! The kale still looks great, but the carrots are looking questionable, so I pulled one out. It’s edible!
My garden looks pretty miserable right now. I’ve been slowly pulling out all of the dried tomato vines. Last night it rained pretty hard, and softened up the soil and vines. I’ve got all but 3 plants/cages pulled out.
I had to go to the store this morning to get a drain zipper, which I LOVE. It pulls out clogs in the drain up to 18 inches down the pipe. While at the store, I took a detour to the freshly stocked garden area. It turns out WalMart has their entire seed selection out. After consulting with the back of some of the packets, I found that some of plants need to be planted in January in my region! What a good excuse to get some $1 seed packets. This morning I planted some radishes, yellow sweet onions, mustard greens, and some cool weather lettuce. I also finally planted some garlic. My southern gardening expert (and one of Ty’s bosses) said I should have planted it the second week of December when we met at the Hendrix Christmas Party. We’ve still got some 20 F nights ahead of us next week, so it will either be good for the garlic or the other things I’ve planted. The winter onions are sending up shoots.
The kale from last season is battered, but it is still growing without me paying any attention to it. We haven’t been at a loss for water around here, and there is already a carpet of green weeds at one end of the garden, and I’m know I’m early, but I’ve got my eye out for asparagus shoots.
On the way home from work last Monday, I could see little green shoots coming out of the rice fields. So today I got the itch to plant in the soil. After completing that task, I expanded some jiffy pellets and planted some long-term crops: onions, leeks, bell and jalapeno peppers, grape, cherry, and roma tomatoes, spinach, cabbage, kale and cilantro.
I thought I was going to put in a seed order from seed savers this year, but so many of the varieties they offered were out of stock. I’m hoping to go to a local seed exchange in March when more of the outdoor planting begins.
I’m excited about gardening this year because my neighbor Sam will be starting her garden too. We’re both farm girls. Her father, a tulip farmer from the Netherlands, will be here in March to help plant. I hope he has as much fun as my farmer father had helping me plant.
Back from my blogging break with fun, crafty updates.
I’ve been working on the Short Sleeved Fair Isle Sweater from the Holiday 2009 issue of Vogue Knitting. The body of the sweater took almost all football season. I would work on it when Ty and I would go to Gusano’s Pizza to watch the Denver Broncos. (Actually, I started working on it right before their losing streak!)
Here are the pictures from when we got back from Nebraska:
Since then I’ve had some time to get the color work done, and that is the fun part:
I’m on the last line of color work now, and I hope to get the neck done, and even block it tonight.
Today I also got outside. It has started to get warmer, so I ripped out a bunch of tomato cages. I’m also trying to figure out my seed order for spring! Seed savers looks like a really cool site, and they even have heirloom soybeans that Monsanto doesn’t own yet.
My friend Stella Capek helped to organize Conway’s first annual EcoFest this past September. She convinced me to give a tour of Covington Towers. Concrete is not a very sustainable building material, but once it is up, if the internal structure is kept from rusting, it is up for good. I also gave a tour of our raised bed vegetable garden.
It was great to get to share our home and our garden with the Conway community!
It is a curious thing living in The South in November, and still having a garden that produces ripe vegetables. Still getting pole beans and peppers. We still have green tomatoes, and last week I canned 14 quarts of pickled green tomatoes. I wanted to make the recipe for Crispy Green Tomatoes from Little House in the Suburbs, but it involved a three day process.
I opened a jar of the cucumber dill pickles Sunday, and they are pretty tasty. They’re soft, so next time the recipe must include alum.
So what worked and what didn’t in the raised bed high density garden? The spinach thrived, but I failed to plant a second crop before the temperature got too hot. The beets went nuts. We definitely planted too many of those. The larger tomatoes really liked being in the ground. They did not like the plastic tubs, unless they were cherry tomatoes. In September, the tomatoes officially outgrew the cages and fell over. Next year I’ll plant less cherry tomatoes, less romas, but more regular tomatoes.
The cucumbers absolutely thrived, but petered out in early August. Next time I’m going to plant ones that stay tiny for pickling. I think my friend Katie planted a type called “straight eight”.
All of the squash was a failure. I’ve been told that during wet summers, “stink bugs” transmit a virus to the plant, and within a week, it is dead. I got 2 summer squash and two spaghetti sqash before everything shriveled up.
I planted way too many Hungarian hot wax peppers. They did so much better when I ignored them. Next year I want to plant more bell peppers and jalapeno peppers. Planted some Serrano peppers, but they always seemed very bitter.
I couldn’t get the fall crop of lettuce or bush beans to come in properly. The kale is still going strong though. We got 3 heads of flat dutch cabbage to grow, but we had to plant seedlings very early before the brassica worms came on strong.
The lima beans and turnips put out a surprisingly small about of food for how long each plant took to grow. I don’t think I’ll be planting those next year.
My two biggest disappointments were the eggplant and the Brussels sprouts. Last year I couldn’t get a single eggplant to form. This year they looked great, but the vegetables didn’t get bigger than 3 inches wide. Sometimes the fruits were yellow instead of purple. The Brussels sprouts never even formed proper tight-headed sprouts. I checked the largest one today, and it is growing other stalks out of where the sprouts should be. Maybe I missed the sprouts in the month of October rain.
The biggest success of the late summer: pole beans. I always grew bush beans before. I had no idea that pole beans produced green beans for the entire season. They’re still going right now. They didn’t even choke off our first year asparagus crown.
The okra did alright. We never had enough for a meal ready at one time. When the temperature dips below 60 they shut down. I planted some snap peas in the same pot in August, and now they’re climbing up the dormant okra. That was a fun experiment.
Next year in short:
Getting back into the swing of things here after a number of excursions. I’ll post entries on each, but until then, I’ve got a mystery growing in my backyard.
I pulled the first one because I thought it was a deformed cucumber. Now I have more cucumber-like vines growing with this fruit.
The way I run my compost pile, most of the seeds germinate and die and get reabsorbed back into the compost before I use it. Sometimes cucumber seeds or tomato seeds get through this process and germinate when transferred to a planter. We share a compost pile with our neighbors and they don’t know what it is either. That makes me think the larger one isn’t mature yet. The smaller fruits are fuzzy. Tomorrow I am going to cut into one. Any guesses on what this is?
Ty’s relatives came down for a visit! Peggy brought her huge pressure cooker canner, and showed me the things that a recipe doesn’t say explicitly. Some may call this wisdom.
This all starts with the large amount ofextra cucumbers we’re getting in. We’ve been saving up. When I went back to Nebraska to visit my family, my mother gave me a bunch of jars, and here’s the secret of the jars: Classico Spaghetti Sauce. I checked it out at the store yesterday, every other jar uses a proprietary lid, but the Classico Sauce uses a regular mason jar/ball lid. Save your jars and give them to a friend or relative!
I also asked my mother for her pickle recipe. She didn’t send me her recipe but found this dill pickle recipe on the internet and said it was close. (She did the same thing with her salsa recipe, but they were no where near the same recipe!)
Before Peggy showed up, I sterilized the jars in the dishwasher, and began cutting up pickles into 4-inch spears and put them in a cold water bath.
Once the spears were ready, Peggy and I went to work stuffing the jars and making the brine.
Peggy showed me how to cover everything with brine, and make sure no cucumber, dill, or garlic stuck up into the air space. She showed me how to clean the ring area, and she let me put the lids and rings on. What I had read on the internet said not to screw them on super tight at that point but she said that she did.
Then we put the jars in the hot water bath. The recipe said to put the jars in the hot water bath for 15 minutes, but here is what that really means:
1. Start with a cool pot and put your jars in. Put a towel in the bottom if you don’t have a rack to keep the jars off of the direct heat.
2. Add water to the pot 1/3 of the way up the jar.
3. Bring to a boil.
4. It’s boiling? Start your 15 minute timer, and turn the heat down to simmer.
5. Remove jars with one of those jar remover tong things. Twist rings tighter when they are cool enough to touch.
6. If you have another batch, go to step 3 and repeat.
So a 15 minute hot water bath is really more like 20-25 minutes, and even more if you are just starting.
Peggy also showed me how to check the lids for a seal and how to turn over the jars for a seal. In the end we put up 19 quarts!
Note the Classico label still on the jar! They are really hard to remove. The last piece of advice Peggy left me with are plastic caps. If you want to return your jars and rings to your favorite jam/pickle maker in good condition, you’ll buy yourself a good plastic lid (or ask them for one!). This keeps the rings from rusting and becoming unusable. Peggy says that sometimes after the lids have set, she’ll remove the ring and put the plastic lid on a jar that she gives someone else if they have returned her jars in the past.
Keeping up with the garden is becoming quite a task. Ty picked all of the ripe tomatoes and cucumbers on Thursday, and then I picked this today:
Ty’s relatives Peggy and CW are heading down to central Arkansas on Monday. CW has classes in Little Rock, and Peggy is going to teach me the art of canning. She’s bringing her canner and her pressure cooker. We are eating most of our tomatoes right now, but the cucumbers are out of control. There are seven cukes in that picture, cukes that didn’t exist 3 days ago!
My mother told me to update my blog when I called her last. That is really encouraging!
I’ve been battling bugs. Ty thinks the chiggers got my shins when I was out picking blackberries. I’m convinced they attacked when we went out to Beaverfork Lake, went swimming, then sat on a blanket in the grass. There were 30 seconds where my ankles were in contact with the grass, and I think they spread from there. The itching has been constant ever since.
I’m not going to post the picture here, but you can click through to this image if you would like to feel my pain. The bites are much darker and gross looking now, but at least they’re itching less. I used a combination of AfterBite, ChiggerX, Calamine Lotion, and Benadryl pills (at night) to fight the itch.
The other bugs I’ve been dealing with are squash borers. My new favorite blog, Little House in the Suburbs, is located in Memphis. That’s about the same latitude that we are at. They had a warning post, a fighting post, and a losing the fight post. The bugs have taken over my spaghetti squash and yellow squash plants. They apparently don’t appreciate cucumbers. The plants have yellowed off and died except for the new growth on the tips. We got 3 yellow squash, and may still get a spaghetti squash before everything dies.
The only way to get through all of this trauma is to relax on the roof. Here are some pre-fireworks/dinner pictures from our roof to put you at ease.
