Making sense of the totals

Well, some more booty out of the Boone garden.
Black Krim tomato: 211g
Stupice tomato: 162 g
Green Zebra: 656 g
Amish Paste: 529 g
Hybrid: 244g
Moonglow: 317g
Eggplant: 191 g
Yellow squash: 477 g
Zucchini: 1.46 kg (This thing was literally the size of my arm, wrist to elbow)
cabbage: 296 g
Purple Green Beans: 41 g
Green Beans: 122 g

The squash and zucchini got grated up and the first 3 cups went into two loaves of tasty homemade zucchini bread. The rest of it got divided up into 3 cup servings and frozen for zucchini bread this winter.
I also tried my hand at a stew this weekend. I bought 1lb of beef and a handful of potatoes from the farmers market. Tossed in garden bounty: onion, green beans, garlic, herbs, carrots. It was VERY tasty.
I had a canning party Saturday. I sent out an open invitation to my friends, telling them what I was planning on canning and when I was planning on doing it. Two took me up on the offer. Brian and Mel got 7 pints of delicious salsa canned out of their garden. I got another 2 pints of my roasted tomato sauce canned.
I'm going to try and make a variety of the sauce tonight using my eggplants. Not sure if I'll go to the trouble of canning it. I might just eat on it for the rest of the week. :-)

So, making sense of totals. The idea with this blog and my garden journal was that when it came time to plan next years garden and order seeds, I could look at what performed well and choose appropriately.

So, starting from spring, and working towards fall, lets see if we can make sense of some of the jumble.
LETTUCE:
I planted Tango lettuce and Monoppa spinach in my cold frame in late March. They both did really well. I can definitely plant the cold frame thicker next year though, there was a lot of space wasted in it this year. Maybe instead of rows of seed, I can just evenly cover the frame in seed.
Outside the frame went the Forellenshuss (romaine) lettuce and 5 color swiss chard in early May. The Forell. did really well, but I'd like to see how it does with an earlier start in the cold frame. It did take a while to head up really well. The Swiss chard got eaten by birds I think. Maybe a scrap of row cover or something next year to protect the baby plants.

ONIONS
No more onion seed for me. That experiment failed. I got spindly looking sprouts that never got big enough to plant. The sets I bought from Earl May were healthy and vigorous and tasty. No contest there.

CARROTS
Carrots came up in early May. I planted Scarlet Nantes and was very happy with them. They are tasty, grew well and are keeping nicely in the fridge. I was told if I want something that will rootcellar over the winter I should look into a carrot that isn't harvested until fall. We'll see.

MUSTARD
So far a rousing success. I harvested lots of seed pods. I'm still processing them though, it's rather tedious. Might plant some more next year. Might not. We'll see.

BROCCOLI
I started from seed a variety called Romanesco, it has been healthy and strong all year, but stubbornly refuses to head. Could be too wet and cold this year. I might give it one more year, but I think I will add another variety more suited for Northern planting. The varieties I planted from Earl May did alright. About half of them headed. Taste was so/so.

CABBAGES
Did alright. They seemed to enjoy the cold wet weather at least. :-) I should have seed leftover so I will probably try them again. Every plant headed, but I think to do anything useful with them I"ll need more than the 2 or 3 I planted this year. Not sure if I"ll find the room for the 6-10 heads that would be more useful, but we'll see. I need to figure out ways to eat it besides coleslaw too. Some sort of kimchee maybe.

PEAS
Well, I planted two types, and I planted them WAY too close together for starters. I thought it would be easier to tell them apart. Course, I saved seed, but I'm not even 100% sure I got the different types sorted totally correct. lol. But, I gave it a good try. The yeilds were wonderful on both. Both tasted delicious. No change probably, just replant the seed I saved and focus on seperating the different varities so I can harvest them better. I think I ate a lot of the pod peas as snow peas.

ZUCCHINI
The Golden Zucchini has so far outperformed the Black Beauty. But, both were tasty and fairly prolific once they got started. I should still have seed leftover so I can see planting both again. They didn't ramble too badly, which was nice.

CUCUMBER
Crop failure on the Cucumber. Not sure if it was the flooding or what, but the little sprouts never got past the first few leaves. I think this is the second variety I've tried, and the second to fail. I might just be destined to not grow cucumbers. Possibly not going to bother planting any next year.

WATERMELON
Crop failure. The vine stayed at 2 or 3 leaves for months and only now has a decent size to it. No flowers no fruit. Might not bother to replant next year.

CORN
Flooding took out all the corn. No verdicts on which of the 5 types is better. :-P I never got the Bloody Butcher corn to sprout at all. So that one might be a bad batch of seed. I can see myself trying one more year on corn, but this is the second year I have totally failed.

SUNFLOWERS
FLooding again to blame for this failure. Brian and Mel mentioned a squirrel cleaned them out of sunflower seeds before they got any. So if I do try again I will try to come up with a bag or somethign to keep the squirrels out of my seed.

GARLIC
I picked 3 of the 6 varieties to try again next year. Based on growth habits and harvest.
German Extra Hardy, Russian Giant and Chesnook Red. The other 3 were either generally malformed and/or small upon harvest.

PEPPERS
Pathetic most adaquately describes my peppers. I think I just don't have the touch. I got maybe one or two scraggly peppers from 3 or 4 plants. Perhaps I'll just leave the peppers to the pros and Brian. :-)

BEANS
I'll replant the Empress Green bean and the Royalty Purple Podded bean, but the Cherokee Black and the Red Runner Beans were not to my taste. The red Runner Beans are really pretty and fun to grow, so maybe just for fun they will get another try.

TOMATOES
Clear winners seem to be Green Zebra, Stupice and Amish Paste with Moonglow following closely. Purple Cherokee and Striped Roman did as well as can be expected. They are always finicky, but tasty enough I might plant them again. Yellow Beams totally failed. Black Tula I haven't decided on. I only got 2 or 3 tomatoes off the 2 vines I had planted. Tasty enough, but hardly worth the space. With all the wet and cold, I'm loathe to judge too harshly, but space will be limited next year, so choices must be made. I can see taking garden space for 2 each of the first 4, but the PC and the SR will need to find homes in my container garden or something I think.

Well, there's the year in recap. The seasons almost over and I probably wont plant a fall garden, just cause I"ll be cover cropping and weeding heavily. Lots of tear down and setup too, getting the Boone garden reverted to sod and the Des Moines community plot under some sort of control in regards to the grass. Plus putting in veggie space around our rental house. So, no time for fall plantings.

Lets hope next year isn't quite so cold and wet. :-)

Canning and planning

Processing the tomatoes was a great success. Dave and I canned 6 pints of salsa and 2 pints of delicious roasted tomato pasta sauce. Our counters are now clear of the layer of tomatoes. Hopefully we'll get some more off the vines this month, but if not I might invest in a flat of tomatoes from the farmers market, just so I can make more sauce. Oh, the sauce was SOOO good. We oven roasted 3 pounds of beefy oxheart tomatoes. I can't remember the name of the variety but it's been producing fairly well. So, we oven roasted 3 pounds, cut in half with garlic and basil and thyme (all out of my gardens) on top. Then I tossed those into a skillet with an onion and a little bell pepper, more garlic and more basil, salt and pepper. An hour later the sauce was done and soooo tasty. 3 pounds of tomatoes and an onion condensed into 2 tasty pints of garden goodness. Completely free except for the water used in the canner and the olive oil.

I'm a little worried about the salsa, it was really really watery, and I think I used too many onions. It was definitely a rainbow, I used orange and green and purple tomatoes. We had a cup full at the bottom of the pan that didn't make it into the jars, so we put it in the fridge and hopefully we'll give it a taste test tonight. *crosses fingers* It was our first attempt at salsa, so we'll see.

Now, I have probably 9 pounds of summer squash and zucchini that I have to figure out something to do with them. I'll probably try to pan fry one yellow squash tonight, but that still leaves 6 or 7. Must do research. Dave has put in a vote for some zucchini bread. :-D We'll see I guess.

Have I mentioned it's nice to be home again? With both of us pitching in, the house is slowly coming back together. The kitchen almost has all the countertops back to usable. :-) Now if I can just figure out where to store my giant canning pots I'll be set.
Next on the house list is finally getting the bedroom put together. We need to get all the clothes figured out and into a place in the closet so that we can rearrange the bed placement to facilitate a crib. :-D :-D And then we need to repair computers and put the desk area into a state of organization.
Also on the todo list before first frost is to round up window treatments for all the windows. I'm looking into plastic wrapping most of them, with some having a second buffer of a wall hanging to stop any hint of drafts. Course that demands I find a way to keep Rienne from climbing said wall hangings. :-D (Something tells me razor wire isn't baby safe.) We did really good with only running the A/C a handful of days this summer. I'm hoping we can continue the trend this winter and keep things pretty cool to save on natural gas costs. Sealing up the windows and hanging wall hangings will help, as will some nice thick wool socks. :-) We'll pile on the blankets in bed, and me and baby heater will keep Dave toasty warm.
I also need to get my cold frame moved from Boone down to the new house so I can plant some fall greens ASAP. I'm hoping this one happens this weekend. I'll plant some spinach and some lettuce and maybe kale and swiss chard. We'll see what I have in the seed trays. With any luck I'll be able to pull some tasty salad greens out in October. But, realistically they should have been planted a week or two ago, so we'll see. I might not get anything more than baby greens. :-D

Seed saving is about to go into full swing. I've got piles of mustard seed and basil seeds staring me in the face. Thanks to my love of basil I have like 3 or 4 different varieties I need to keep separate during cleaning and drying and bagging. :-P Lettuce seeds are probably ready to harvest from this spring, and green beans are getting close. Gotta save green bean seeds, I can make baby food from green beans. ;-D

Anyway. Lots to do. More pictures will be up soon.

Yay for savings. (And August recap)

Well, I've given 2 weeks notice at work.

That sentence looks so calm on my screen, but there was nothing calm about this past week. The short of the story is I didn't appreciate how my team was treating me. Whether or not the behavior was based on my pregnancy or my gender or just plain dislike, I can't say. I don't particularly care. I don't think it's too much to ask for courtesy and respect, and I'm not so hard up that I have to stay in a position that doesn't give me those basics.

So. Now I'm a 2 month pregnant engineer looking for work. In Iowa. :-D Fun.

The good news is even after a move and a wedding we still have a months worth of bills in savings. I'll have 3 more work checks on top of that. Plus, a whole week of vacation next week. :-D My parents, being the wonderful people they are, have already offered us the basement should "It all hit the fan." I figure even if I end up working at a grocery store we can manage to keep the roof over our heads. But, it's nice to know we have someplace to land if we fall.

My darling husband did a fabulous job of keeping up with the harvest out of the gardens while I was gone. So we have an additional buffer of an overflowing freezer and cabinets covered in a layer of tomatoes and squash. My stress relief for the next few days will be processing lots of tomatoes. Currently I'm planning a batch of salsa, (a healthy snack choice for me and tadpole this winter) a big batch of tomato/veggie sauce, and probably a small batch of stewed tomatoes.
Last night I froze up the last batch of peaches. Colorado peaches... Mmmm... in my honey and water solution. (1 cup water to 1/3 cup honey)

Without further ado, here are the garden totals for the month of August.
Cherokee Purple Tomatoes: 175g
Stupice Tomatoes: 76g
Moonglow Tomatoes: 551g
Green Zebra: 828g
Striped Roma Tomatoes: 182 g
Random Tomatoes Dave couldn't identify: 2957g
Green Beans:507 g
Purple Beans: 119 g
Basil (dried): 9 g
Green Zuchinni: 853g
Yellow Squash: 607g
Mint (dried): 40g (talk about prescience, I didn't know I was prenant yet, but I harvested armfuls of wild mint out of the garden and dried it to make a tummy soothing tea)

Total harvest for August out of both gardens: 6.9kg
15.2 pounds for those of you who prefer non-metric weights.
Not up to the poundage from July, but it's hard to win weighing tomatoes versus onions. :-D Density and what not..

So, let the processing begin. Anything not fit for storage will be eaten over rice or pasta in the coming weeks, ad nauseum I'm sure. :-D

One plus one equals three!

:-)
As most of you know, Dave and I tied the knot a month ago. The thinking was, together we are stronger than we are separately. So, we've known from the start that one plus one equals more than two, we just weren't expecting physical proof of that quite so soon. :-D
I am happy to announce Dave and I are expecting a child.
:-D
I am sadly still traveling for work, and it's very hard to be away from him and the rest of my support network right now, but the money will come in handy. If we are counting on our fingers right, we overwhelmed the birthcontrol sometime during our honeymoon and our new addition will be born at the end of March, 2009. Just in time to greet new spring plantings.

We are both really excited, and frantically trying to figure out how to make all this work. It's frustrating knowing that the most my company currently offers for maternal leave is 3 months unpaid leave. I really don't feel that's long enough for me and baby, but with me being the primary income in the family, and my student loans breathing down my neck, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to stay away from work. But, we'll figure it out I'm sure.

We're both in agreement we don't need to make this more complicated than it needs to be. I'm not sure when a new baby went from "clean out a dresser drawer for baby to sleep" to "get a bigger house, baby needs a room" but I'm not interested in following that trend. Baby can join us in our bid for austerity and living lightly and I'm positive she'll be no worse off for it. (In case you're wondering, I'm hoping for a girl, and Dave is mostly ambivalent.) We are also both in agreement that this is the only child we want to conceive. The human population needs to contract if it's to have any hope of living sustainably on this planet. That means if at some point we want another little bundle, we will seek to adopt. So, we will enjoy this experience, as poorly timed as it is. :-D We've put out the call to our respective families to help find a stash of cloth diapers and used baby clothes. I'm planning baby food into the garden for next year. And we're both really happy.

Not sure what else to write today, I've been away from the gardens for over 2 weeks now. Dave is bravely taking charge of them. We're getting lots of tomatoes and squash and beans. He's keeping up on the weigh ins and hopefully sometime soon we'll get together and I'll get this blog updated with some of those numbers. So, tune in next week for actual garden blogging and more my usual fare.

July totals and the garden handoff

Ok, time to tally things up for the month of July.

Produce pulled out of the Boone garden last week:
Stupice tomatoes: 190g
eggplant: 250g
Purple green beans: 190g
Green beans: 130 g
Pole beans: 320

Produce pulled out of the Des Moines garden last week:
Kohlrabi: 390
Basil (dried): 13g

And... Drum roll please...

July Totals
Peas: 30g
Onions: 42 onions
Bush Green Beans: 1267g
Purples: 720g
Pole Beans: 593g
Carrots: 2528g or 2.5 Kg!
Garlic: 31 harvested
Kohlrabi: 1045g
Basil: 13g
Stupice tomatoes: 190g
eggplant: 250g
Green Sage (dried): 6g
Stevia (dried): 7g

Total produce: 6649 grams, plus the onions and garlic which weren't weighed. The average garlic head should weigh around 70g and mine were all good size, so we'll run with this number for now. That adds another 2170g bringing the total to 8819 g plus onions. If I convert it all to pounds it's 19.4 pounds plus onions. I have 5-10 lbs of onions. So, 24.4-29.4 pounds of produce out of the garden for the month of July. Not too shabby. :-D

I'm pretty proud of how well the garden was planned this year. The entire North row was harvested in the space of one week. The entire center row is going to seed. The South row is all still in production. This is going to make it very easy to hand the garden off to Dave this weekend. Instead of being overwhelmed by the care of all 950 square feet, all he has to worry about is the South row.

Yes, the gardens will be in Dave's care until October. We were planning on me having very limited time to garden in the months of August and September due to my job's busy time. "Very limited" has officially been downgraded to none. Due to a team member being unable to fulfill his travel requirements, I've had to pick up his travel. I've been told I'm leaving August 11th and I shouldn't expect a day off or home time until October 1st. Super. So, Dave is in charge of tomato, eggplant, squash and pepper harvest. I know he'll do fine. I honestly don't know what I would do without him.


We went out to the Boone garden yesterday. There was some slight hail damage to some of the tomatoes and one of my two pepper plants was broken off close to the base of the plant. Sadness. But, plenty of tomatoes for harvesting. We spent time going over the row and talking about what he'll need to look for and what he'll need to do. We tied tomato vines up and harvested giant piles of mint and mustard so I can try and process them before I leave. The mint is being dried and the mustard needs the seeds gathered out of their many pods. We harvested a pile of Stupice tomatoes. I'm really pleased with this variety. It's a strain out of Czechoslovakia and has hands down won the "Early" prize for my garden this year. I want to say I have 3 vines of it in the garden, and I've pulled out over a dozen ripe tomatoes this past week. The Moonglow variety had a ripe one, and the hybrid had a couple. My squash hills finally have one fruit set. Woot. Oh and the watermelon vine I thought was dead is actually still alive. Hee hee.. not sure if it'll get it's act together in time to put on a watermelon, but there's always hope. *Still* waiting on the Romanesco Broccolis to head. These things take forever! It's supposed to be worth the wait though. If they head while I'm away and I don't get to eat any of it I'm going to be pissed. I harvested the cabbage head and the pretty purple kale. I found a recipe for a soup with Kale in it, but I don't think we'll have time to fix it before I leave, I'm planning on just drying it and powdering it to make it into a healthy additive for soups. The cabbage head I'm completely in the dark on. I still need to research whether it's better to freeze it or leave it in my root cellar.

Anyway, there's the progress report. Hopefully Dave keeps up with the tomatoes and remembers to record data on how much he harvests. If not we'll just have to make up numbers. :-D

Busy-ness

Lots of busy-ness this last week. So, this post is going to be a little long.

The onions and garlic bulbs are curing nicely. They've been in the living room for most of the curing, our weather has been too unpredictable to leave them outside while Dave and I are away at work.

I harvested the second round of green beans last week. (yes, some are purple) I have harvest totals for the week, but they are... somewhere not here. The beans were wonderful, tasty and prolific. What more can a girl ask? I was eating them straight off the vine while I was picking them. My wonderful mother came over yesterday and helped me can. Even brought a few beans from her fridge and Daddy's garden. We ended up with 4 full quarts of green beans. Not too shabby. My first canning experience went well. Except for picking the hottest day in weeks to do it. :-P We got all four burners on the stove going and that kitchen got warmish. :-P But, we survived and I learned the basics of canning. I think I'm going to practice again soon with some corn. Not out of my garden, as all my corn was a bust this spring, but fresh and local corn is relatively easy to find right now.


My Stupice tomatoes (Stupice is the variety) fulfilled their promise of earliness. I have 3 little round tomatoes from those vines. I also harvested an eggplant. I'm going to combine those into a pasta sauce tonight with some mozzarella cheese and fresh basil. Mmmm... :-D

Mustard is very close to harvestable. I'm hoping to gather the seed pods this week and take them on my business trip next week. I expect long hours in a hotel room that would be perfect for the task of opening seed pods and collecting mustard seeds. It possible I'll have lettuces seeds to do also. They are surprising me with how long they are taking to set seed. Oh well.

A couple of my container garden basils are setting seed. I didn't get much harvested from them in terms of seasoning, but the seeds will be valuable and I can possibly harvest more leaves this fall if they bounce back from the seed removal. We'll see. I'll have plenty of herbs to keep me busy. Mint has taken over my kaput corn patch. Literally knee high bushes of mint. I'm going to harvest some to make into tea. I have a really healthy Stevia plant that I'll also dry and make into a sweetener. I'll get some Thyme, green sage and a bit of chives too if I can figure out how to dry them. If I'm on my game and have a bit of luck I'll get the first round of all those harvested and started drying before I leave.

I'm starting to think I'll need to hand pollinate my squashes. Still no fruit set. Not sure what their problems is. I wonder if I put too much compost in their hills and they are soo busy putting leaves they are just uninterested in procreating. :-) Lots of male flowers, so I could harvest those and fry 'em if I wanted. Not sure I want to though. I saw someone selling squash blossoms at the farmers market Saturday. She had a shallow bin with water in the bottom and the blossoms packed in tight with their stems in the water. They looked pretty. One of these days I'll get around to frying some. I want squash first though!

I think I'll harvest my cabbage when I'm out next. It's nice and big and the outer leaves appear to be very mature. I've almost got my root cellar area finished in the basement, so hopefully it can go down there.

We are starting to get bills for the first month of utilities in the new house. Hopefully we'll sit down tonight and look them over and I'll have some usage totals for my Riot 4 Austerity pledge.

I'll end with a picture of some of my farmers market tasty goodness for the week.

Here Kitty Kitty... part trois

Well step 3 has commenced on the kitty raw diet adventure. :-D
I bought a big bird at HyVee a couple of weeks ago. It's called a capon. Not sure what that is, but it was very bird like. I paid 16.81 for it, and it made 1400 grams of kitty food. I portioned it out into 13 days of food. That means I'm paying 1.29 a day to feed Rienne. Still a little high, but manageable. She was begging for scraps as I was preparing the meat, so I gave her a part of a wing to gnaw on. She did attempt to eat parts of the wing off the bone, but was a little put off by the complexity and bone. So, if I ever want to get her to eat prey or raw meaty bones, we'll need to work on that skill set. But, for now, she really enjoys the meat in large chunks, cut off the bone and she eats the organ meat without fuss too. So, we're two hurdles down at least. :-D