Soggy Garlic, planning for fall

So, according to my garlic planting guide, I needed to refrain from watering the garlic after June 1st. Hahahaha... well I certainly didn't water them, but I'm thinking the 7 inches of rain we've gotten this month might be effecting my garlic. With any luck things will dry out for the next few weeks and maybe the skins won't rot off my garlic. *crosses fingers*
I planted 5 types of garlic this year. I thought it might be a few years before I had this kind of space again and I wanted to see what grew best. Up here in zone 4 I have to grow hardneck varieties of garlic. (For comparison, most of the garlic sold in stores is the softneck varieties, the picture above is one I've planted, notice the "hard neck" between the cloves) Two of the varieties, Music and Georgian Crystal, are small and slightly malformed. The other three are tall, sturdy and well formed. I'll do a taste test and storage test to make a final decision. Due to time constraints, (now is the time to order garlic for next year's planting) I won't have the taste test done in time, so I'll probably just order a couple heads of the three that are growing well and if one of them is really stellar in the taste test I'll plant an extra head of that one from the harvest.

The spring plantings are about petered out and the summer plants are growing quickly. If it's time to order garlic, that means it's time to start thinking about my fall garden. This year I want to try a fall harvest of turnips, lettuce and maybe radishes and carrots. The root crops will probably need to be in containers as my summer garden will be up in Boone and I'm stretching the forgiveness of my landlord to keep the garden up for August harvest after I'm off the lease. So, turnips and maybe carrots will be in a large pot. Beets and lettuce I could grow together in my cold frame which is mostly disassembled already, I just need to move the pieces and reconstruct it in Des Moines. It'll go on the south side of the house, pictured below. (the side with the concrete)
There's a shed just out of the picture to the left, so only half of the Southern exposure is really usable. I might put in a small tomato/herb bed under the mail box. Also not pictured is a HUGE evergreen tree to the right, putting most of that East lawn under deep shade. Most of the container garden will go on the sunny back porch. (West side of the house) The back porch is surrounded by a 3 foot strip of weeds on all 3 sides. I'll hope to dig those out and plant perennials this fall. I'm thinking rhubarb and strawberries and lilies and peonies and iris, with hostas in the deeper shade patches. Maybe a small rose bush, if I can find one small enough.
If you open the picture up to it's full size you can see the sunken windows for the basement that I hope to make a root cellar in to store all the fall harvest.

Lots of plans. :-) But, if you know me that shouldn't come as a surprise.
Move day is 2.5 weeks away!!
Handfasting is 1 month and 4 days away!!!

Peas!

Cedar Rapids court house Thursday.

Another part of Cedar Rapids Thursday.
Above photos: (AP Photo/Steve Pope)
The flooding this week has been disastrous. Des Moines, Iowa City, Cedar Falls, Cedar Rapids, all under water. Close to 10,000 people forced to evacuate their homes. Cedar Rapids is still without clean drinking water. Thousands of city blocks were claimed by the river.

Events like this remind me again why I want to have emergency preparedness kits. Right now the people in Cedar Rapids have no water, some have no gas/electricity and all are pretty much stuck where they are until the waters recede. All major access routes in and out of the city are under water. Hospitals have been shut down. How many of those people had the necessary supplies for something like this? Probably not many.

Amidst the chaos this week has brought it was nice to get in my garden this morning and put my little piece of earth back to rights. The wind is so fierce today I couldn't get my floating row cover back over my South row. It'll have to wait till tomorrow. My wild flower patch has started to bloom. :-) I managed to save 4 little swiss chard plants. If I can get those to grow to maturity I should have a nice replacement for the lettuce. Beans are growing fast. Tomatoes are taking a beating in this wind, but several still have blossoms and all are healthy looking. Garlic, Onions and Carrots have the same story. My broccoli has started to head. Mmmm broccoli. Squash is busy putting out runners. The watermelon vine is looking kinda splotchy, but I'm hopeful it'll put through. Mustard is flowering. I'm excited to see if I get usable brown mustard seeds from the patch. So far so good.

My pea vines are going gang busters. I did run into a slight problem as I had planted two kinds of peas close together. I have a shell pea and a snow pea. The harvest time is about a week different for the two, as one you leave in the shell and eat it with the immature peas inside and the other you wait till the peas inside are mature and split them out of the pod. I thought it would be easy to tell them apart when it came time to harvest... I think it's maybe not so easy. :-) Some were clearly one or the other, but there were a handful I just had to guess on. Hope I got it right, but I guess it doesn't matter too much either way.

Harvest totals today:
273 grams of lettuce, we've officially got more that we can eat. :-)
80 grams PEAS!!
20 grams baby carrots.

In search of the wild rhubarb

Here's me tromping through the overgrown back half of Dave's yard. That's where the 5 wild patches of rhubarb live. Got the first mosquito bites of the season. It's amazing what every creek in the area overflowing it's banks will do to resident mosquito populations.. :-P

This pretty shot is my Russian Kale. I'm glad it looks pretty, cause I honestly have no idea what to do with it. :-D Hopefully I get that researched soon.

This is my beautiful cabbage! This thing is 3 feet in diameter. This is my first year with cabbages. I grew them from seed and I only have two growing this year, the second one is a couple of weeks behind this guy. I'm guessing the small little nub in the middle of it is where the cabbage head is growing.

And finally, proof of peas! This little guy peeked back at me when I went to inspect the peas. I have lots of tiny pea pods on the vine and loads of blossoms. *fingers crossed* Please no hail this weekend!

While I'm chatting about the garden, my tomatoes are looking great! Three of them have blossoms and all of them are looking super, nice green color, new leaves being put on, just great. Beans are growing happily. No casualties to rain or rabbits.
Garlic is still doing great. No signs of the leaves drying out yet so they must have a couple more weeks till they think about harvest. Course, with all this rain, maybe the little bulbs are rotting in the ground.. :-D Who knows... :-D
The onions are enjoying the daily rains. I want to get some mulch on them, but I'm worried they'll rot if I do that, so I'm holding off till the end of the month.
I thinned my carrot patch yesterday. Got several tiny baby carrots. :-D
The beats, sadly, are officially dead. Something ate the tops off most of them, and the rest flooded out with the rain. This is the second year I've failed at beets. :-P
The corn is the other casualty. The seeds rotted in the ground and the seedlings died in their tray inside because it's been storming every day since they sprouted.
I'm trying real hard to keep the okra alive in it's tray. It most definitely would not like the current conditions. I might just have to let them go and reseed new okra, and hope they're ready to go outside in a couple of weeks when things are dry.
My swiss chard suffered a set back this week. Something nibbled at all of them, so to keep that something away and protect the little remains from the pounding rains I transfered one of my cold frame windows over and propped it up over them. Hopefully that helps out a little.
Spinach is officially done in my garden until sometime this fall. I'm still eating off the last harvest of it though. Had some spinach with my eggs this morning. :-D

Well there's the news from the garden for the week. :-D Have a good Tuesday!

Mmmm... Turnips... and Soup!

I discovered a love of turnips this weekend. There was a pretty pile of them at my local farmers market and I was looking for things to throw in a soup. I nibbled on them raw as I was chopping and they were very good! They made an excellent addition to my Chicken and Noodle soup. I might try and grow some of these tasty veggies this fall. Apparently they are one of the easiest, most nutritious plants a gardener can grow. With both the bulbs and the greens being edible.


Jennie's Chicken and Noodle Soup (version: Spring 2008)
Chicken stock
Chicken leg & thigh
5 stalks of Celery
4 average sized Turnips
3-4 Carrots
Half an Onion
bunch of Green Onions
Thyme
Sage
garlic
shell noodles

Put stock in large pot, boil chicken parts in the covered pot with enough stock to cover them, with the garlic, green onions and half the Thyme and Sage.
When chicken is done 20 minutes or so, lift it out of the stock. Add 2 cups of water and any remaining stock to the stock/spices mix still in the pot. Add diced carrots, turnips and onions, cover and simmer.
While the veggies are cooking, separate the chicken from the bone and chunk it. Add the chunks back to the pot.
Cook, covered at a simmer for at least an hour, more if you like. Add remaining half of Thyme and Sage about 15 minutes before serving.
When you add the Thyme ans Sage, cook the pasta in a separate container, following package directions. Drain pasta and add to soup right before serving.

Salt and Pepper to taste.

This recipe made enough soup for Dave and I to have dinner on it and lunch the next day. Super with some leftover bread. :-)
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Harvests this weekend:
303 grams of mixed greens
131 grams of rhubarb

I'll have PEAS later this week!! I have a boat load of little baby peas on the vines, with lots more blossoms right behind 'em. :-) Mmmm peas.

Here kitty kitty..

The past couple of days I've been pondering my new commitment to Riot 4 Austerity. As I go about my daily routines I've been thinking about how they fit into the commitment and what about them (if anything) needs to change in order to reduce my consumption.
An interesting thought occurred to me yesterday, what should my kitty eat to consume less?

I love my companion cat. Her name is Rienne, she's smart, she's affectionate, she's clean and she plays fetch! Currently I feed her Science Diet dry cat food. My vet recommended it. She seems to enjoy it, she eats well and appears healthy, but I've noticed she's a tiny tiny bit overweight. I didn't think much of it because like me, she's been living in confined quarters for the past year. I did some research this morning and now I'm starting to wonder if her diet may be unhealthy for her. I'm a big believer in proper diet.
That begged the question, what's a proper diet for a cat? Cats are obligate carnivores. I am not. Come to think of it, as of this posting I haven't had meat in a few days. So my first step was to figure out what an obligate carnivore needs for diet requirements. Apparently, it means not only do they need meat, grains are mildly poisonous to them because they don't have the enzymes to digest them. The Science Diet dry cat food I've been feeding her has "Chicken By-Product Meal" followed by a whole host of grains. Eek! The lack of meat is made up with a lot of additives and supplements. To make matters worse in my mind, the "food" is stored in warehouses and shipped all over the country, in who knows what temperature, degrading the nutrients even more before it ever gets to me and Rienne. Completely unacceptable.
Frustratingly, a lot of the resources I found online were unsubstantiated claims, often contradictory to other unsubstantiated claims. This made it difficult to find accurate information on how to go about a whole foods diet for Ms. Kitty. Eventually I did find a site up to my standards. Footnotes referencing studies and research papers backing up logical intelligent claims. This page has all their articles including 12 chapters explaining the hows and whys of a raw meat diet. They even have an article on how to can the cat food. :-D I was immediately enamored with the site.
The cost of a whole foods diet works out to the same price as or a little cheaper than a store bought diet. This site works out some of the math so I'll spare you the calculations here. There is a weird formatting error on that last site, so I lost the last sentence of every third paragraph, but the information was still really good.
This site was written by a lay person, not a vet, but I really liked her straightforward way of presenting her findings on switching her cats to a raw food diet. She even has a pictorial of how to make the food. :-D
There are a couple of books I want to check out before embarking on this journey with my cat, including Michelle Bernard's book, "Raising Cats Naturally." And it's definitely going to be something we ease into so it's happy for everyone involved, but I think it'll be healthier in the long run. She's been exposed to meat, all of her obedience training was done with raw meat. So I'm hopeful the transition can be accomplished with a minimum of fuss.
I see a whole, raw food diet being much simpler to keep up in the coming era of limited energy. Instead of her diet being dependent on the giant oil driven transportation network and petroleum based supplements it'll be dependent on local healthy meats just like my diet.

Links from above:
http://www.catnutrition.org/foodmaking.php
http://www.catinfo.org/makingcatfood.htm
http://www.felinefuture.com/nutrition/

Baselines

So, it has come to my attention this morning that my goals are hazy at best. Admirable, but hazy. To remedy that situation I have joined Riot 4 Austerity. Their goals are to document the successes and failures of individuals and families attempting to reduce their consumption to a mere 10% of what the average American consumes. In order to track my progress I will attempt to calculate out my baseline consumption, (what I consumed from June 1st 2007 to June 1st 2008) so I'll have something to compare it to next June. I'll be using the Riot calculator available on their site. They skew some of the numbers on consumer goods, letting you use a reduction on your numbers if you buy used or locally made, but most of the calculating is just straight numbers.
Fuel: I use about 25 gallons a week. That's 261% of the Average American. Eek. Good thing I'm moving at the end of this month. The only thing saving my budget is my nice little car getting 38 mpg.
Electricity I just can't calculate right now. Between my place and Dave's place, my roommates running computers constantly, my grow lights this spring for seedlings, food in both refrigerators at one point... I have no clue. I'm up on the CFL's and lights don't stay on for no reason... I'll just assume I run about average. And go from there.
Heating and cooking fuel I'm probably way over average, between Dave's house having a giant hole in the roof and the farmhouse leaking like a sieve I probably used my fair share. Neither house was kept balmy, but figuring out my portion of it would again be a nightmare.
Garbage I'm a little light on. I'm putting a high estimate of 20lbs per week in the calculator and it's telling me I'm at 63% of an Average American. Between the worm bin and the compost pile, all my organic trash gets eaten. I've been avoiding heavily packaged food for years now, and Dave and I recycle what we can and try to cook from scratch.
Water I think I'm a little light on too, I put in an estimate of 50 gallons per day. I take a 10-15 minute shower which is 20-30 gallons of water, add in 5 flushes a day at 3 gallons per... some light hand washing of dishes... I don't wash my car, or my cat. I don't water a lawn. I hand water my garden, so in the peak of summer, maybe another 30 gallons a week. Again, between me at Dave's house and the plants at the farmhouse, that's too many roomates and too many variables to figure out my share. I think I'm a little light of the average currently. :-) We'll go from there.
Food wise, I'm a bit heavy on the wet/processed/non-local goods still, but my bulk unprocessed is at the right level. And my local isn't too far off. If I can eat out of my garden this summer that should get really close to the goal levels.

I'm excited to see how far I get in a year. If I can get down to 10% on a few categories I'll be happy. If nothing else it should be an interesting experiment.

May Totals

Drum roll please....
For the month of May, I harvested 834 grams of produce. 520 of that is rhubarb, with the remaining 314 from lettuce.
Now, you might be saying, that's not much produce. It's not even a full kilogram. But, that's enough for salads at every other dinner for two people for most of the month of May. Plus a couple of tasty rhubarb deserts and a lot of frozen rhubarb. Close to 3/4 of that produce was free. Not too shabby. All my lettuce packs have paid for themselves, and they are still going strong.

To start off April, I harvested some more lettuces this afternoon. 150 grams of mixed greens. Tasty, tasty free lettuce. Most of that harvest is again just thinnings, with everything still producing strongly. I'll need to start watching for signs of bolting if we get into a spate of hot weather. If I have to harvest everything to keep it from going bitter in heat, everyone I know is going to get some salad lettuce. :-D

The picture today is a picture of the romaine lettuce I'm growing and harvesting right now. It's tasty and pretty. Gotta love heirlooms. It's called Forellenshuss. Which is Austrian for speckled romaine. :-D