Garlic Planting 2015

I started this blog in September 2012 with planting garlic.  The purpose of the blog was to provide myself with a diary of work in my garden.  I had tried many methods of keeping track and all had failed.  This was my last resort to log garden activities - successes and failures - and I started with garlic.  Three years and one month later, I'm planting garlic again.  I'll save the retrospective for another post and just get on with the garlic!

This year, the garlic is being planted in the bed that previously was home to onions - NOT an ideal decision on my part, but this bed was good and rich.  The onion crop was outstanding.  This bed is the only one that is totally free of planting and was going to be topped with good old SeaSoil, so we'll just see how we get along!

First the bed was turned over and raked.  I got the bulbs ready having saved the best bulbs from this year's harvest.

I set the bulbs beside where their rows would be.  This year I planned to have double rows of each variety and since I don't think I really grew enough last year, I have 8 bulbs to plant.  Hopefully that will be enough. In the picture above, from the top are Leningrad, Czech, Spanish Roja, Porcelain and an unknown variety I've been growing for years.

I carefully peeled back the papers and gently pried out the cloves, setting them in place and then pushing them into the ground just up to the top of the clove.

Finally, a wheelbarrow load of SeaSoil was raked over the top and the whole planting left to soak up the winter rain.  Garlic doesn't like competition from weeds so it's important to give it a good mulch.  This year's planting takes up just over half of one concrete raised bed.  In a few weeks I may find the first brave green spikes thrusting up through the mulch.

A few cloves were determinedly stuck together and these were brought into the house for consumption.  In spite of the poor garlic year in which many people bemoaned the poor garlic harvest, Leningrad and Porcelain have produced magnificent cloves.

Garlic taken care of, a quick look around the garden showed that the Brussels Sprouts are finally starting to form.  Whether or not they'll be ready in time for Christmas - who knows!

Bright Lights Swiss Chard is delighted that the cooler weather is here and looks just as beautiful as it tastes.

The heritage Italian beans had been harvested and brought into the potting shed to start drying.  Today I brought them into the house to finish.  It won't take long to complete the dehydration and then I'll shell them and store them away for planting next year.

Chunky Apple Cake

It's apple season!  This year the apples are a little on the small size, given the extreme dryness we've experienced, but are as delicious as ever.  There's nothing like an apple freshly picked off the tree.  A friend who was going camping made what she called my apple cake to take with her.  Of course it's not my apple cake as I got the recipe from someone else, but it is a family favourite.   I always make it at this time of the year to use up some of our excess apples. Moist and delicious, it has chunks of apple and nuts in it and we usually top it off with cream cheese icing.  Today I made it with walnuts and divided the cake in two, freezing half for later.

Chunky Apple Cake

4 cups peeled, chopped apples
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup oil
1 cup chopped nuts
2 eggs, beaten
2 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt.

Preheat the oven to 350F and grease a 9x13 pan.

Peel and chop the apples.  I used our favourite Gravenstein apples.

Mix together apples, sugar, oil, nuts, eggs and vanilla

Mix the dry ingredients together.

Combine the wet and dry ingredients and pour into the prepared pan distributing it evenly.  The batter will be thick.

Bake at 350F for 45 to 60 minutes - until golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

We topped half of our our cake with cream cheese icing, but my friend baked hers as cupcakes and planned to serve them with frozen yoghurt.  And I'll bet it would be nice with raisins instead of walnuts - or even with.  Or perhaps dried cranberries.  The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Zippy Salsa 2015

The last time I made salsa it was a hit - hot without being too hot and full of flavour.  Since each time I make it, there are slight variations in the ingredients, it seems smart to document exactly what I put in each batch to arrive at the ultimate recipe.

This year nearly all the ingredients are from the garden.  I had to purchase a red and a yellow bell pepper as my Gypsy peppers weren't ripe yet, but other than that small portion, all the fresh ingredients are ours.  To the mild peppers - Anaheim and Poblano, I added a Garden Salsa and a Hungarian Hot Wax as last time I made this, I didn't realize that Garden Salsa were actually hotter than  Jalapeño and the last batch had a LOT of Garden Salsa!  Hungarian Hot Wax are even hotter....

Zippy Salsa 2015

8 cups coarsely chopped tomatoes peeled and seeded - all Health Kick
1 cup Jalapeno peppers seeded, cored and chopped fine.
3 cups mild peppers chopped and seeded
1 cup sweet red pepper chopped and seeded
1 cup sweet yellow pepper chopped and seeded
2 cups chopped onions
1 small bulb garlic minced
2 cups apple cider vinegar
1 can tomato paste
2 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp salt
1 Tbsp fresh oregano minced
2 tsp paprika

Wearing rubber gloves for all the peppers, core, seed and chop.

Make a cross on the blossom end of the tomatoes and immerse them in boiling water to loosen the skin.  Seed and chop.

In a large non-aluminum pot (I used my new Maslin pan!) combine all ingredients.  Bring to a boil, stirring often.  Reduce the heat to medium low, simmer, stirring often until thickened enough that a Tbsp dropped onto a plate flows slowly in one stream when the plate is tilted.  Takes about an hour.

Using a funnel and ladle, fill hot pint canning jars leaving 1/2" headspace.  Cover with prepared lids.  Screw on bands until resistance is met; increase to fingertip tight.

Process in boiling water canner for 20 minutes.

Bean Strategies and Dealing with a Tomato Glut

This year we set up a bean arbour in hopes of providing a solid structure for the heritage Italian beans.  The vines are incredibly vigorous with large leaves.  The first year I grew them in with the corn in a Three Sisters Garden.  They proved too much for the corn and broke the plants under their weight.  Last year they were on the bean rack my husband made me, but since it was 8' tall, I couldn't reach the beans at the top and lost a lot of the crop.

This year I decided to try a bean arbour.  My daughter grows beans very successfully on a metal garden arbour and I thought, why not try something like that much bigger - like a grape arbour.  So last May, my husband built me my bean arbour which spans 2 concrete raised beds.  It is covered with bean vines!  So much so that that the beans are again trying to escape.  Some vines have managed to latch onto the corn which is now thankfully finished.  Others have tumbled into the Queen of Denmark rose which is behind the beans.

The solution seemed to be to provide more avenues for escape and to that end, we set up ropes which tie onto the fence behind the garden.  Then I twined loose vines on the ropes to encourage them.  We should have done this long ago, but at least there's another month or so of growing time.  And it will certainly be easy to pick these beans!

Meanwhile, the tomatoes are flourishing.  Today I picked a good 25 pounds of Health Kick tomatoes - and this just from 6 plants!  These tomatoes will go into Zippy Salsa and Tomato Soup but there will still be lots left over to give away.

The tomato plants are far from finished - there are still lots more on the road to ripening and I have yet to harvest from the Principe Borghese plants.

I was worried that it was too hot for the Brussels Sprouts planted earlier this summer.  They are doing just fine, thank you, and hopefully will provide homegrown sprouts for Christmas dinner this year.

And as for apples, we are already picking Macintosh, and the Liberty isn't far behind.  This poor little tree struggles each year with its enormous crop of small, red, scrumptious apples, branches bending to the ground.  One of our favourite apples for fresh eating.  The drought we're experiencing is hitting the apple trees hard and we've purchased watering bags which zip around their trunks and provide a slow drip of water to help them out.

Storing Onions

When you spend a lot of time and energy producing a top-quality product, you want to ensure that it's properly looked after.  How you store onions is important.

This year's Copra onions have been harvested.  As described in an earlier post this summer, when the tops started to fall over, the plants were signalling that they were reaching maturity.  When all the tops had come down (a couple were helped by me!) I pulled the onions up and left them on the top of the bed to continue curing in the sun.

Onions drying on wire racks

After a few days, rain was predicted and so it was time to bring the onions under cover.  I placed them on big wire racks we have for sifting soil and left them in the potting shed to finish.

Trimmed onions

Today the tops looked quite sere, so I cut the dried tops off with scissors, being careful to leave a long top in case any onions still had moisture in their stems.

A number of years ago, my husband made me a vegetable bin.  It has 3 storage sections, 2 of which I store onions in.  These sections have wire fronts to allow air flow.  The bottom section I use for potatoes and this one has a solid front to keep the potatoes in the dark.  The bin sits in our unheated garage and the onions last very nicely in their storage bins until spring.  This year's crop was more than the bins could handle, so the remaining onions will stay in their wooden crate  and sit in our cool dry crawl space until needed.

If you'd like to braid your onions, keep the dried tops on.  There are lots of good videos on the Internet to tell you how to do it.  I wasn't very proficient, so this is how I store my onions!  Hang braided onions in a cool, dry place and just snip off an onion as you need it.

I'm very disappointed with the yellow onions I grew from sets this year.  They are quite a bit smaller than the Copra and have flat bottoms.  This means a lot of digging to get out the root end.  And much to my dismay, I discovered they're already going soft!  Obviously not good storage onions at all!  Thank goodness for Copra!  These onions are large, have good flavour and store extremely well into the spring.  In fact, when cleaning out the bottom bin this morning I discovered some forgotten onions from last year and while most had started sprouting, 3 were still nice and firm!  What a great onion!

Tomato Blossom End Rot

It's August of what is turning out to be the driest year on record.  The garden is suffering!
In spite of the deep watering I'm doing in the tomato bed, I'm seeing blossom end rot on some of the Health Kick tomatoes.

Blossom end rot

I've seen this a lot in plum-type tomatoes in my garden when they haven't had adequate water,  but Health Kick tomatoes have been better at withstanding the problem in the past.  Not this year!  I think it's because the crop is so heavy. I've never seen so many tomatoes on plants before!  Most of them are sound, but if I turn over smaller, stunted tomatoes, there's the rot starting.  I pull those ones off right away and discard them.  I know that the bed was well prepared with home made fertilizer, compost and SeaSoil, so I don't think that nutrition to the plants is the problem as it usually is with blossom end rot.  In my case, I think it's just that the crop is so huge that the plants can't keep up moisture-wise.  So I keep watering and pull off the ripening fruit and finish the ripening in baskets in my kitchen so the plants have less fruit to cater to.

Aphids

The kale is also struggling.  In the Russian Red Kale, whenever I see a leaf curling over, it's got aphids inside.  Unfortunately, it's the tender young leaves that are most affected, so today I'm going to pull up the Russian Red Kale.  Blasting the aphids off with strong water streams is not keeping the problem in check.  So far, the Lacinato and Siberian are managing to avoid it, but in this dry heat, I don't think it's going to be long before I see aphids on them as well.

Sprawling butternut squash vines

The three butternut squash planted in the compost bin have been doing their best to escape into the garden.  Every morning the vines look happy and healthy, but by afternoon the leaves are drooping.  I give this bin a good, deep watering every day and spray the leaves as well, but it seems to make no difference to the afternoon droop.

Big squashes!

Fortunately, it hasn't seemed to affect the fruit of the plants.  These have to be the biggest butternut squashes I've ever grown!  I guess the plants are putting all the energy into the fruits!

Italian heritage beans under the bean arbour

The only bed that's been able to maintain a good moisture level is the corn/beans bed.  We've had a wonderful crop of corn and its pretty much finished now, but the beans are just getting going.  They are so rampant, that I'm going to see if my husband will tie ropes from the bean arbour to the fence so the vines can have more areas to sprawl to and make picking easier.  It seems that all in all, my vision of the bean arbour is going to work.  There are beans hanging down underneath the arbour already waiting to be picked.  I'll put them in tonight's butter chicken dish!

Tomato Soup

Knowing that my garden is swamping me with tomatoes at the moment my friend, Laila, sent me a recipe for tomato soup.  It looked simple and tasty, so today I gave it a try.  It's a winner!

It's a basic recipe and I can see many additions to change it up.  You could add rice or sausage chunks - the possibilities are endless.

To the tomatoes, onions and carrots, I added celery - all ingredients from the garden.  The Health Kick tomatoes are perfect for this soup as there are relatively few seeds.  These tomatoes have 50% more lycopene than regular varieties and the plants are loaded.  I also threw in some Principe Borghese tomatoes as I used a package of turkey stock that was 4 cups instead of the 3 mentioned in the recipe.

Onions, celery and carrots were chopped and then sautéed in butter until the onions had started to soften.

I quartered the Health Kick tomatoes, but left the Principe Borghese whole.

Seasoning was a strip of lemon rind, bay leaf, salt, pepper and sugar.

When the onions had softened, I put them in a large pot with the tomatoes, stock and seasonings and brought it to a boil, then simmered it for 30 minutes.   I pureed it in my food processor, but it's times like these that I wish I hadn't given away my blender which does a better job of it.

I garnished my bowl of soup with a dollop of sour cream and a chiffonade of basil leaves.  Delicious! Thanks, Laila!

Here's the recipe - I added celery and changed the peppercorns to fresh-ground pepper.  I didn't bother with the cream, but garnished it with sour cream and thinly sliced basil leaves.  And of course, I didn't peel the carrots!

Basic Tomato Soup

2 Tbsp butter
1 onion, chopped
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
2 lb tomatoes, quartered
3 cups chicken stock
1 1" strip of lemon rind
1 bay leaf
6 peppercorns
1 tsp granulated sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup cream (optional)

In a heavy pot, heat the butter on medium-high heat.  Add onion, carrot and lemon rind.  Cook, stirring until the vegetables are slightly softened - about 2 minutes

Add the tomatoes, stock, bay leaf, peppercorns, sugar and salt.  Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer gently for 30 minutes.  Remove the bay leaf and lemon rind.

Puree in a food processor.  Return to the pot, add 1/4 cup cream (optional) and simmer for 5 minutes.

Pickled Jalapeño Peppers, Carrots and Onions

It's amazing how many peppers 2 Jalapeño plants can produce!  I do have plans for making the Zippy Salsa, but that won't use very many and I needed to find some more things to make with them.  For Christmas, my daughter-in-law and son gave me Alice Waters' book, "The Art of Simple Food II" and in it I found a recipe to pickle jalapeño peppers, carrots and onions.  Since I had so many peppers, I doubled the recipe and still have plenty of peppers to give away!  And lots more on the plants.....

I started by slicing the peppers in 1/4" rounds.  Then I rinsed them under hot water to tone down the heat a little.  Since this is my first time making this recipe and many of my peppers had striations on them indicating they'd be a little hotter, I thought this was a good plan!  The carrots were also cut in 1/4" rounds and the onions were sliced into thin wedges.

The veggies were sautéed with oil and salt.  Then apple cider vinegar, water, sugar and a couple of bay leaves were added and the whole shebang simmered for 10 minutes.

I got 6 half-pint jars and since I had doubled the recipe, they were processed in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Of course I opened one jar - it will sit in the fridge and probably won't be there for long.  The pickles are delicious!

Pickled Jalapeños and Carrots

1/2 pound jalapeños
1/2 pound carrots
1 yellow onion
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup water
1 Tbsp sugar
2 bay leaves

Slice jalapeños and carrots into 1/4" rounds.  To reduce the heat of the jalapeños, rinse them in hot water.  Slice the onions into slender wedges.

Heat a large skillet and pour in the olive oil.  Add the peppers, carrots, onions and salt.  Cook over medium high heat, stirring occasionally for 5 minutes.

Add the vinegar, water, sugar and bay leaves.  Bring to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes.  Pour into a nonreactive bowl and cool before serving.

Pizza!

Yum!  Pizza!

Our daughter-in-law recently made a pizza dinner for us - and it was delicious.  I have made pizza in the past but usually bought the crust and used purchased sauce as well.  She inspired me to make it from scratch and with as many home-grown ingredients as possible.  With that in mind, I asked her for her dough recipe:

2 cups white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 Tbsp instant yeast
3/4 tsp salt
1 Tbsp oil

Mix, knead for 8 minutes.  Let rise 3 - 4 hours.

Armed with my DIL's recipe, I prepared for a pizza dinner tonight.  For toppings, in addition to purchased chicken and mushrooms, the sauce, tomatoes, onions and peppers would all come from our garden.

Prepared toppings

I used my mandolin to slice the onions, Anaheim pepper and tomatoes thinly.  Mushrooms were sliced by hand.

Frozen pasta sauce from last year

The sauce was made and frozen last year.  To make it, I roasted tomatoes, onions, carrots herbs and spices together and then pureed them, freezing in usable batches.  Find the recipe here.

Chicken thigh meat sautéing

I sautéed the thinly sliced chicken, seasoning it with salt and pepper, then set it aside until needed.

I made the dough in a double batch.  Once it had risen and been punched down, I cut it in half and froze one portion for another time.  I will thaw it in the fridge overnight and rise it again before using.

The oven was set to 450F with our pizza stone in it.  When it was nearly up to heat, I rolled out the dough.

Pizza on the stone and ready for the oven

When the buzzer went off, I pulled out the stone and put the pizza shell on top, then quickly smeared on about 3 dessert spoons of sauce, then topped it with grated Mozzarella cheese.  Toppings were arranged and a small amount of Mozzarella added as a finish.

The resulting pizza was definitely a good one, but there is always room for improvement.

Next time, I'll bake it at the 450F temperature.  When I went to put the pizza in the oven, I noticed that it was no longer at full temperature.  When heating up, the broiler element goes on in my oven and I didn't want to risk burning the top of the pizza so knocked the oven back to 425F.  I'll watch for that next time!

I will also roll it thinner at the edges.  The outside crust was a little too thick for my taste.  I'll also bake it a little longer.

Nevertheless, the pizza was a success and a dish we will certainly make again.

Crash Hot Potatoes

Recently on Facebook, my brother shared a post on Crash Hot Potatoes, a dish originating in Australia.  The picture looked so amazing that we decided to try it.

We started with some of our own Seiglinde potatoes.  I chose 6 smallish ones for the experiment and boiled them until fork tender.

While they were cooking, I covered a small cookie sheet with foil, drizzled oil on it and preheated the oven to 425F.

I got the seasoning ready - finely chopped thyme, freshly ground pepper and coarse Kosher salt.

When the potatoes were cooked, they were placed on the cookie sheet and flattened with a potato masher.  More oil was brushed on the smashed potatoes and the herbs and spices sprinkled on.  Then they baked in the oven until golden brown - about 20 minutes.

Added to a meal of pork cutlet, swiss chard and carrots, we pronounced the Crash Hot Potatoes delicious.  Another time I'll try adding pressed garlic and/or a little cheese.  Definitely something we're going to have again!

El Nino in the Garden 2015

This is turning out to be the driest year we have experienced in the garden and many of the crops are showing stress in spite of all the water that I'm giving them.

Butternut Squash

Many crops are very early.  Strawberries were weeks ahead of time and the crops were pretty good.  The corn is loving the heat, as are the beans.  Other heat-loving plants like peppers and squash are quite happy so far, but they all need water.

Fruit trusses on Health Kick Tomatoes

The tomato plants are huge and early on set a bumper crop of fruit, but now the flower trusses are not setting.  I've had to really keep an eye on this bed because it's one of the beds that cedar roots have managed to creep into.  I hadn't realized what was happening and almost lost one Principe Borghese plant before I discovered how dry the soil was. (Update 5 hours later:  with a temperature of 28C and a strong wind, the tomato plants were losing moisture so quickly that they were starting to wilt and a second deep watering was required.)

Principe Borghese Tomatoes

In checking back, I can see that most years at this time the fruit is just starting to turn on early tomatoes.  We've been snacking on Gold Nugget and Sweet Millions for a couple of weeks now!

Corn is a heavy feeder, too, but this bed is maintaining a good quality of moisture and I think it's the tallest corn we've ever had.  I'd say we're only a couple of weeks off harvest for the corn and the Italian heritage beans haven't even started to flower yet!

Signs of aphids on the kale

Kale is a cool weather lover and it's really struggling in the heat.  I've noticed leaves are starting to curl up and there are signs of aphids starting to make their homes in the leaves.  I'm picking those off, and the kale is getting lots of water, but the heat is telling on their general health.

Harvested garlic sorted into varieties

I just finished harvesting the garlic and am quite disappointed with the size of the bulbs.  This might be because of the heat.  They reached maturity a couple of weeks early and this means that time that might have been spent growing was lost.

Copra Onions starting to fall over

This was also true for the onions.  The yellow onions have already been harvested and I'm seeing signs that the Copra plants are approaching maturity.

And this makes things difficult for the young Brussels Sprouts plants which were just transplanted.  I will probably have to rig up some sort of shade for them to carry them through to fall.

Everything else seems to be coming along well, but each day I'm out there giving the veggies a good drink.  The perennial beds have been ignored.  Water is so precious that only the vegetables and plants in pots are being catered to.  A newsletter from West Coast Seeds addressed this issue and also finished with the sobering thought that the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting that there's a 95% chance that these conditions will continue through fall - and an 85% chance that they'll go through the coming winter.  Now that's scary!