Winter bits from the garden...

We recently had a fairly severe cold snap with below zero temperatures that lasted for several days. When I went outside this morning I went to the garden to see if there was anything at all that could be salvaged.  I actually found some kale and pulled up a clump of onions. I used some of the onions in potato salad today and will be using the rest of them and the kale in some vegetable soup soon. I know there are lots of Jerusalem artichokes out there that could be harvested. It is so nice to realize that even though winter is upon us, there are still fresh things to enjoy.

 

The Survival Gardener post about our garden

I hope you enjoy this post from David the Good about our garden. 

 https://www.thesurvivalgardener.com/yolandas-2000-lbs-garden-yield/#comment-648357

Incidentally, the picture with the chicken is our granddaughter with her favorite chicken.  The woodland scene is where I take my walks in our woods.

Me and the corn 2023

 Here is a photo of me and this year's corn.  I am standing in front of our patch of "Bloody Butcher" flour corn. We estimate it is more than 12 feet tall! Over on the right you can see the bi-color sweet corn, which we are currently enjoying. The Bloody Butcher corn is what I use for cornmeal now. It's very good to eat and if nothing else, it's amazing to grow!  No one has ever said anything to us about it, but I really wonder what the neighbors think. :)  To my right is "Sammy", our sweet old Staffordshire terrier. In front of me are the sweet potato vines.  The garden is a jungle right now. I love this time of year.

Swiss Chard

 

Have you ever grown Swiss Chard?  It is a variety of beet that I grow.  You don't eat the root.  You eat the leaves.  They are very similar to spinach in flavor, and the nice thing is that they do not "bolt" when the weather warms up.  You can eat them all season and into the fall.  With some protection, they can even stand through the winter and you can eat them next year!  Of course, next year they will go to seed, but if you don't want that to happen, just keep cutting off the seed stalks. Like spinach, they have oxalates, so you don't want to eat these greens in large amounts every day.  Here is an excellent article all about them: Swiss Chard: Nutrition, Health Benefits, and How to Cook It (healthline.com) 

In the picture above you, can see our row of Swiss chard.  It will get much bigger than this, too, as the summer advances. To the right you see turnip greens, which are wonderful, also.

My favorite way to cook Swiss chard, other than just putting it in soup, chop it up with some sliced green onion, a few sliced mushrooms and some cubed tofu.  I sauté all of this in a little fat-free vegetable broth and then serve it on it's own next to some sort of starch... rice, lentil loaf, potatoes, whatever I have.  I put Bragg's Liquid Aminos on mine.  

Last harvest of 2022

     It's been a good garden year.  I had to be gone all of August, which threw a bit of a wrench in things, but even so, I was able to can corn, green beans, tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, green beans with potatoes and sweet pickle relish.  We got to eat a lot of wonderful sweet corn, and dug 140 pounds of Irish potatoes and about a bushel and a half of sweet potatoes. I froze lots of sliced okra, which I enjoy using in soups and stir-fry with rice. My Garden Fairy planted 5 rows of dry beans, and it seems, as she's finishing up shelling them that she'll have about 4 gallons of the beans which are a combination of Navy, Pinto, and Black beans. So, overall, it's been a great year!

Today was my last harvest, as it will definitely frost tonight.  Here it is!

And so it begins....

 

In about a month it will officially be Spring!  I put sweet potatoes in jars of water this morning to grow slips for this year's garden.  It did my gardening soul good.  Happy Gardening 2021!!!  That is one thing the pandemic did not affect.  I was still able to grow food. I enjoyed it very much last year. 

Garden report 2020

 This season, we weighed all of the fresh vegetables that we harvested in our garden.  I've never done that before, but I'm so glad I did!  The total came to 1,027 pounds of produce!  And that doesn't include the 57 pounds of luffa gourds!  Here are a few pictures from this year.  We had plenty to eat, still have plenty to eat and I was able to can and freeze many things to carry us over until next spring.

It's been an amazing year and I'm so grateful!

"Bloody Butcher Dent Corn"

This is a picture of me standing in front of our "Boody Butcher Dent Corn."  It is an heirloom variety and I plan to use it to make cornmeal.  We measured it at 12 feet tall!  I bought the seed from www.rareseeds.com

Garden, July 5, 2020

Garden, June 28, 2020

Update on Garden 2020

Garden 2020

This year, we have cut the size of our garden to about a third of what it has been for a number of years.  Since it's just me and my husband here, we simply don't need to work that hard anymore!  I love the new size.  He does plan to make another simple greenhouse for me so I can harvest greens through the winter and soon I will start building the soil in that area.  Many things are already coming up...  we had a late freeze and I had to replant tomatoes and peppers, but everything is happy now.  Here is a picture of how it looked this morning.  :)

Remember the Hugelkultur?

I posted about this 2 years ago, here.  I've used the Hugelkultur bed for two seasons now, This will be my third.  I think it is finally losing height.  I was amazed at how slow that process has been.  This year, I decided to put a strawberry patch on it.  All around it is lots of mulchy things from last year and I've got all the plants nicely tucked in with mulch.  These are ever bearing strawberries.  I hope it will work!

 

Monster radishes!

Two years ago my daughter came and helped me make a hugelkultur in the vegetable garden. You can read about that here:  

http://simplyhomemaking60.blogspot.com/2017/10/hugelkultur.html

This morning I went out to check on some radishes that I had planted in the hugelkultur in March and neglected to pull up.  Here is what I found!

Surprisingly, they are good flavored and not stringy.  In fact, they are very good!  So, I cut them up and have started a ferment.  :)

Then I cleaned and blanched the greens and ended up with 4 nice little packages for the freezer.

The Sweet Potatoes did MUCH better than I expected!

My husband and I dug up the sweet potatoes this afternoon.  With the overall dismal results from this year's garden, I was very surprised at what a good harvest we got - and very grateful! Here they all are in our wheelbarrow.

Look at this one!

I can't help but wonder just how that happened!

When you harvest sweet potatoes, you need to let them "cure" for at least a month.  If you eat them right away, they are rather bland.

After we did all this and got them into the house, I cooked one of the two that I had left from last year and made a sweet potato pie!  We'll have that for lunch tomorrow.  I make my crust with whole wheat pastry flour, NON -hydrogenated lard, salt and milk.  The pie filling is sweetened with just 1/2 cup of honey.  It makes a very nice, wholesome pie.

Sweet potatoes don't like being cold.  I just store them in baskets in my kitchen, and they last for a long long time.  

Forgive me, I had written "hydrogenated lard" yesterday.  I've corrected that now!  Yikes!!!

A very nice surprise!

As I've mentioned, this gardening year has been a disaster because of the extremely wet spring.  I was thrilled, though, this morning when I went out there and found that the kale is recovering from disastrous insect damage.  I'm very grateful!  Now we'll have kale all winter to enjoy.

A Very Rainy Year... 2019

In case you are wondering why I've not been sharing any garden pictures this year, I thought I would mention that we have had so much rain that our garden is ruined, for the most part.  I am getting little bits of things... kale, a few carrots, and am still hoping the sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes will give us something, but other than that, we've pretty well given up.

On a happier note, and for your viewing pleasure, here is a picture of our 4-year-old grandson at the airport.  :)

And now I can make a case for always canning and/or freezing more than you need, if you have the storage space.  I cleaned and reorganized the canning shelves yesterday, and can see that in fact, I really don't need to can anything this year.  I did do some baked beans and some store-bought cabbage recently. I have plenty of everything else.  I'm amazed and grateful.

I hope that if you grow food, your weather has been better!

We finished the Sorghum "molasses" !

My garden fairy and her little boy came to our house and we all worked together and finished making the Sorghum.

I stayed up until midnight cooking the juice and finally gave up.  I finished it the next morning.  From approximately 5 gallons of juice, we got about 2.5 quarts of syrup.  Oh, my, it's lovely stuff!

A job well done....

Gardening does pay off... even if there are problems.

This year we have a terrible raccoon invasion.  They ate ALL the sweet corn before it was even getting close to being ripe.  And now they are eating and knocking down tomatoes that are green.  Ugh!  Next year we will have an electric fence to keep them out.

Nevertheless, in spite of the raccoons and weeds, there is lots of food out there.  I went out and picked things today and cut up 7 different vegetables and one herb to make a stir-fry for supper. It was very good, by the way, served over rice with some soy sauce.  Here is what I put in the stir fry. The big white blob is some frozen onions.  My garden onions were starting to rot in the ground, so I pulled them all and sliced them and froze them in little packages.  Clockwise from the onions are sugar snap peas, sweet banana peppers, tomato, parsley, leek, and okra. I also added some fresh garlic from the garden. I feel, well, privileged. There are so many of our brothers and sisters in the world that have so little to eat. 

June 30, 2018 - Garden, Etc....

I went out this morning and took a lot of pictures of the garden and a few other things, so you can see how lovely everything is here on the last day of June.

Kitty greeted me when I went out the back door this morning...

...to hang up laundry.  It is supposed to get well up in the 90's today!

And since we've had plenty of rain along with the heat, the sweet corn is VERY happy!

This year, for the first time, we are growing THIS squash.  I am very excited to see how these turn out! 

Here is some very nice eggplant growing on the hugulkultur bed..

A distant view of the whole vegetable garden:

My favorite day lilies:

Corn silk:

Cucumbers:

Okra - I love it.  It looks quite exotic to me.

Okra blossom:

My one and only Jericho lettuce plant.  It is a volunteer.  Jericho lettuce is wonderful.  It stands the heat and tastes very nice even in the heat of Summer.  I pick off the outer leaves as I need them.

New spinach crop for fall:

Here is the row of sweet potatoes, inter-planted with onions to discourage bunny rabbits:

A row of sweet sorghum.  I am going to attempt to make sorghum syrup.

Our sweet dog, Badger:

Crayfish hole in the grass:

Two of the chickens.. I was letting them free range... until they found the garden!  Poor things.

I have begun experimenting with stinging nettles for fiber this year.  Here are some of the fibers that I stripped and they are hanging to dry.  I have no experience with this, at all, so I am trying to figure out what will work best for me.  Did you know that during the 1st World War, the German army's uniforms were made from nettles?

A bit of cordage I made:

And a swatch I wove on my little pin loom:

It is hard to see here, but this is a side view of the bower my garden fairy and I made for her little boy out of basket willow branches.  There are two benches in there.

I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into what is going on here right now.  

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