Wild Food

Baby and I were walking home from the grocery store yesterday and we saw a doe with triplets! All three little fawns were still in spots, and they were all following their mom across the bike trail and into the adjoining woods. I looked it up on Wikipedia and white tail deer can have triplets about 10% of the time. Needless to say, they were adorable.
That same trail has a surprising amount of wild food growing along it. I picked wild raspberries for about 10 minutes and ended up with a quart of them. I can remember berrying as a child with my family in Texas. Someone, I think my aunt, knew a guy with a pasture that had berries in it, and we'd load up buckets and cousins and vans and go pick berries. I probably haven't picked berries since that summer 15 years ago. But, I still remembered the tricks to it. A pleasant walk, all things considered, and the berries will be tasty in some oatmeal.

Scapes!!

Yay!! I have scapes! Some of you may recall I planted my garlic early this spring instead of the recommended fall planting. Hardneck varieties of garlic will put up a flower stalk called a scape, and in order to promote bulb formation those scapes have to be cut off. My farmers market friends had scapes a couple of weeks ago, I was starting to think I wouldn't have any. It was quite a relief to see them yesterday.

Produce out of the gardens this past week:
4 yellow zucchini
1 black zucchini
6 kohlrabi
3 onions
peas
basil, oregano, sage

We'll be having Pureed Kohlrabi tonight. And I'm going to try and get the last of the peas cooked into baby food then frozen.

Eating More Turnips

Part of eating locally is adapting to the foods that actually grow in your region. As Sharon says, "Grow what you eat and eat what you grow."
Root crops were not a huge thing in my family growing up. We lived in Oklahoma, it's so hot and dry there, I don't even know if you can grow a decent beet or turnip in that state. It was much easier to live off the okra, tomatoes and beans that thrived. So, now I'm living in zone 4 Iowa and okra is kind of a gamble most years. I keep getting bumper crops of root veggies that I don't have any familiar recipes for. These crops will grow even in late fall/early winter up here, so they're a great way to extend my garden harvests, but I have been scrambling to find ways to eat them.

Then today I was thinking to myself, "Self, there may be others out there who need root veggie recipes." So, here are some of the ways I'm eating root veggies right now.

Turnips can be snuck into soups. I'll be honest, I don't care for the taste of turnips, so I just hide them in things. Last night I snuck one turnip into my Garlic Scape and Potato soup. Turned out delicious and as required, I couldn't taste the turnip. :-D

Carrots I've been putting in everything. Soups and salads are pretty obvious. But a couple weeks ago I had some leftover grilled squash and carrots from a grillout. I made up a tomato sauce and tossed the squash and carrots into it. On some tasty whole wheat pasta, the carrots fit right in.

With beets I like a nice borscht. If you've never had fresh borscht on a cool fall day, you're missing out. It's a Ukrainian soup made primarily of beets. Sooo good.

Don't forget, beets and radishes and kohlrabi and turnips all have edible greens. If you're a seed saver and you find yourself with an overabundance of these, try sprouting some on a windowsill as a nice fresh green in winter.

If you're up in my neck of the woods, try a nice fall crop of root veggies this year. Plant the seeds in a few weeks, end of July-ish. They'll actually taste better after the first frost.

Another wet spring

Well, apparently Iowa wasn't the only one with lots of moisture this year. I'm reading reports of Late Blight in the NE part of the country. Apparently there was a huge lot of tomato starts that went out to chain stores infected with Late Blight.
So, for all you tomato and potato growers out there, even if you aren't close to the NE part of this country, check your plants for Late Blight signs and properly dispose of any diseased plants. This disease was responsible for the Potato Famine in Ireland.




More info:
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/3000/3102.html
http://www.uvm.edu/extension/?Page=News&storyID=14464

Things are growing great in my gardens. The West bed of the downtown plots has lots of flowers on my green beans. I seeded a row of carrots in between two rows last week, that's the 2nd planting of carrots for this season, I want to try and do one more in a week or two so I can have a late fall harvest. Hmm, oh the 2nd planting of green beans that I tossed in that plot are sprouting. Hopefully they will set beans after the first plantings have slowed down.
The East bed of the downtown plot has flowers on the potatoes. According to my little book, that means that the potatoes are forming under ground. I did get them hilled, but I think I'm going to need to do it again this week. My hills of cucumbers, squash and zucchini are all getting big. Lots of flowers, I'll probably harvest zucchinis this week. I also transplanted in a dozen or so strawberry starts. They are June bearing, and I got them free from one of my mom's work friends who was trying to tame her strawberry patch. Hopefully the rain we got this weekend will help them settle in to their new home.
The Franklin plot is about to need an onion harvest. They are looking soo big and healthy. I'll probably harvest the first few this weekend, but most of them need a couple more weeks to really bulk up. I still don't have any sign of scapes from my garlic. The plants are big and healthy, with lots of leaves, so surely garlic is forming under the ground, they're just not interested in putting on scapes I guess. The first carrots are starting to form. Still very small and at least a month away from harvest, but looking very healthy. The kohlrabi are doing fabulous. I'll harvest the first of those this week and have at least a couple a week for the rest of the summer. Tomatoes are growing well, as usual with the wetness, the Green Zebra is the healthiest, it's already got flowers and the others are just starting to think about it.
My containers are doing well too. Dave and I ate the first eggplant from my container-grown eggplant on Friday. I made a pasta sauce with it, it was pretty tasty. The great thing is I have 4 more eggplant fruits set on the bush, with another half-dozen flowers. I am definitely going to grow my eggplant in a container every year. It's huge, happy and productive, plus the flowers are pretty, and it's right on my back porch. Couldn't be happier with this experiment. The pepper plant has a pepper set, the tomato is happily growing, the herbs are all tasty. I'll have radishes to harvest soon, maybe a week or two.

All is going great. I love eating out of my gardens, it's so much more personal, eating food that I've grown.

Potato Mission Deux

Happy Summer Solstice everyone. Enjoy these days, they are only getting shorter from here on out. This light cycle is what triggers bulbing in onions. Southern states who enjoy less variation in day length get to grow onions that don't need that cycle to bulb. Did ya know that? :-) Now you do. Speaking of onions, mine are doing just what they are supposed to. I can see the tops of onions forming.

Well I got the potatoes hilled this morning. Baby and I went out first thing, and glad we did too, it's supposed to top 100 in the heat index today. I could see little buds where flowers are forming. My gardening book says that's a sign that potatoes are starting to form under the soil. I'll need to keep up on their water while they are flowering. Luckily the rain showers are doing my work for me right now.

Green beans are putting on flowers too. I need to get a succession planting done soon. :-)

Hope this first day of summer finds you well. More exciting garden blogging soon.

Herb harvest

I harvested the first round of herbs from my container garden yesterday. I filled the dehydrator, that's not bad for mid-June. Dehydrated some strawberries too. Mmmm the kitchen smelled nice.
Test your herb knowledge, in the picture see if you can find the following herbs.
-Green Basil
-Red Rubin basil
-Green Sage
-Chives
-Oregano
-Rosemary
-Thyme
:-)

I harvested a large bowl full of lettuce from the Franklin Plot. They were random volunteer lettuces, but still tasty. :-) I let a couple lettuce heads go to seed in that bed last fall, just to see if I'd get any this year, I guess that little experiment was a success. Not hugely so, only three heads, but still cool.

So, my garlic experiment is starting to worry me, the bulbs aren't sending up scapes. Last year I had scapes by this point in June, and this year, not even a sign of them. They are at the farmers market, so other Iowa garlic is producing them, just not mine. *sigh* I guess I'll wait and see, maybe they are just a few weeks late.

It's been so wet here I haven't gotten my potatoes hilled yet. Did you know that green potatoes really are poisonous? That's why you have to hill, because otherwise the little potatoes get sunlight and they turn green and poisonous.

Anyway, things are growing nicely, I've got blooms on my eggplant and on my pepper plant, the onions are bulbing, the kholrabi and carrots are growing bigger, and the green beans and squashes are putting on leaves like there's no tomorrow.

Potato Mission

First off, shout outs to my Daddy, who planned an awesome family trip for us! My whole little family went and joined him, and a fair chunk of his side of the family, canoeing in MO. Waaay too much fun. Baby had a blast, and thanks to grandma's and great grandma's babysitting, Dave and I even got to go canoeing at the same time on Sunday morning. We managed to navigate 2.5 hours of Jack's Fork River without tumping over or divorcing. :-)

Anyway, I checked on my Downtown Plots this morning. The West bed is full of green beans, all merrily growing and up to a few inches tall already. 2 long rows of a purple bush variety and 2 long rows of a green bush variety. I have left enough room in between the rows to grow fall crops of swiss chard or spinach or beets. (We'll see if that actually happens.)

The east bed has all the hills of squashes and cucs putting on real leaves. It also has the potatoes and they have reached 6 inches. Now, my little gardening book tells me that at 6 inches I should "hill the potatoes." So, my mission today during Rowen's nap time is to figure out exactly one should "hill the potatoes." Is it a simple matter of hoeing more dirt up? Do the hills have to be a certain shape? Is compost cool to hill with or should I use plain dirt? Can I hill too much?

Now, the more observant of you will probably be wanting to know how my potatoes got in the ground instead of my fabulously planned Vertical Potato Trial 2009. Well, the frame got built, but when it came time to put the potatoes in there, I realized I wouldn't be able to easily move it. And with plans to move houses in the next month, I was loath to put the potatoes in the frame and risk losing the whole crop. So, executive decisions were made, and the potatoes got planted in the east bed at the Downtown Plots and the frame got safely moved, and is patiently waiting for a permanent home for Vertical Potato Trial 2010. :-) Potatoes are an experiment crop for me anyway, planting them in the time honored fashion will not be a wasted experience.

I'll report back when I have some answers.