Seasonal Cooking

I went to a couple of farm stands today to supplement what I have coming in from the garden.  We picked up some raw milk, corn, fennel, a head of lettuce, and watermelon.  I was thumbing through cookbooks this afternoon trying to decide what to cook up, but I just couldn't find what I was after.  So I just winged it.  I find myself cooking like this more and more often- using meals had elsewhere or a recipe as a springboard for a new off-the-hip dish.  Today this what went in the pan (the pictures are nothing fancy, just shot straight from the cooking vessel before my battery died):

Carrots, fingerling potatoes, fennel, and sweet onion with 4 oz diced raw bacon, all tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper, the roasted at 400 degrees .  Topped with fennel fronds and dill:

Corn (3 ears, grilled), 4 oz diced bacon (cooked), 1/2 sweet onion (sauteed in bacon fat), a handful of halved cherry tomatoes, raw cream, basil, salt and pepper......kind of a creamed corn/succotash inspired dish:

Obviously I was in the mood for bacon.  :)

Raspberries, pea greens, green beans, peppers, and potatoes are about all I have coming in from the garden these days.   No complaints there!

Wrapping up the old year, planning for the new!

I have taken a bit of a blog-acation.  It has been nice, though I am feeling very out of touch with my fellow garden bloggers.  Hope you all are doing well, staying healthy, and enjoying the seed catalogs as they stream in.

I did some ordering this past week, it was all about tubers.  Sweet and 'Irish' potatoes have been checked off the list.  Georgia Jets and Vardaman (a bush variety) were ordered for sweets, Swedish Peanut Fingerling, Caribe, and Red Cloud for the standard potato varieties.  I started with a few more pounds of seed for this past year's crop, but as I have mentioned just a few (wink, wink) times in the past I am short on space going forth.....so the varieties and total pounds of seed were slashed for 2011.  But no worries, I plan on going back to full scale potato production for 2012, so that helps make it a little less painful.

Still deliberating over eggplant varieties.  Oh, also ordered some Red Baron onion sets to plant in the new garlic bed.  I believe I grew this variety from seed in the past, but the sets were available from Moose Tubers (my potato source) so I went for it.  It will be good for the soil biology to have something growing in it until garlic planting time.

Here is the dirt on the potato varieties from Fedco/Moose Tubers:

Swedish Peanut

These fingerlings were the pleasant surprise in our potato patch this year. We’ve come to expect that our late-season fingerlings will be troubled by rhizoctonia, but these proved otherwise. One September, we pulled ten plants and filled a bushel with spotless thumb-sized spuds, even late in the season. As for taste, it is the only potato that we let ourselves eat before it goes to market. Dry and golden flesh; this year’s pick for “really soaking up the butter.” Seed in short supply; order early. BACK!

Caribe

An early digger, and a nice size. Its brilliant purple skin fades in storage, but you won’t have any left to store! For a summer barbecue, make your potato salad shout with Caribe, Red Gold, and a Yukon or two. Even though its name, pronounced ca-REE-bay, invokes the Caribbean, it was released by AgCanada in 1984 to grow in the Maritime provinces so it’s also well suited to our northeastern climate. Caribe has a creamy flavor, a medium-dry texture, and snow-white flesh. You can dig them late into the season, just make sure you hill well, and you will get some gigantors. Medium-sized plants are high yielding with purplish blue flowers. Resistant to scab and storage rot.

Red Cloud

An excellent choice for a red storage potato. With super-dry flesh, your mouth will water as you mash and fluff these pearly white potaters. Named for the Oglala Sioux chief, you will find these plants equally burly, resisting scab, early blight, hollow heart, heat stress, and drought. These plants are medium sized, with spreading vines and dark violet flowers. Supply limited; order early. BACK!

New Plans and Storage Crops

I have been sketching out plans for the 2011 garden already since we need to build some new beds, and I am still lacking space (of course- is it ever enough?).  This means I must prioritize what I want to grow, and weigh that against what I should grow.  Taking stock of what I have sitting in my pantry yesterday was insightful, and it will help me assign crop space for next year .  There is a decent amount of food put by in canning jars and freezer bags as well, though much of it is fruit we picked elsewhere.  I have herbs, kale, green beans, tomatoes/tomato products, pesto, raspberries, and currants from my own garden stashed in the freezer.  Relishes, sauces, jams etc. are on the shelves, but it is the for a pantry I am interested in.  Those high calorie, get-you-through-the-winter roots.

Here she is, my mixed bag of tricks "pantry":

 China, stem-ware, animal chow, and dirty vegetables!

Now for the walk through.....what is left of my globe onions:

(I am not going to bother growing these next year,

 space is at a premium and onions I can buy anywhere.)

Garlic braids are hanging, and I also have an allium drawer with shallots, a few heads of garlic,

 and more red onions, some of them globe, some of them a long heirloom variety:

(Onions are not my best crop.)

Next are the potatoes, and they are everywhere.  The bag holds my fingerlings, 

and the box holds potatoes from a friend's garden.

This drawer has Purple Viking, Keuka Gold, Red Cloud, and Russets:

Sweets:

And that is it.  No winter squashes from my garden unfortunately.  I have made peace with the need to just buy them from others.  A friend and I split a bushel of butternuts from a local farm, so I have a small stash to admire and cook up as I please (and an acorn with a price tag, sigh):

So would you all make my week and post what you have for storage crops, and how you store them?
Canned goods and stocked freezers are always fun to see too.
Share your thoughts on the amounts you grow, what you are pleased with, and what you would like to improve upon.  Winter will quickly be upon us and we will dreaming of digging the earth again come spring, so link your posts in the comments section and show us whatcha got!!

Downhill From Here

I realized today that sadly, my garden has peaked.  The big heirlooms are practically non-existent in 'Tomato Alley'.  The beans are overgrown, and the beetles have discovered them.  The dang rabbits continue to eat my seedlings, and the dog hair is unfortunately doing little to discourage the little beasts.

As of today, all of the potato bags have been emptied.  (I still have fingerlings in the ground, and sweet potato vines.  I say vines because I have yet to find a tuber when nosing around in there, it has been so dry......wishing I could rewind and water that bed on a regular basis.)  The good news is there are still plenty of fruits and veggies to harvest over the coming months.  Cucurbits are behind for me this year, so they are just getting warmed up.  The cool nights of late may put a stop to all of that though.  Ground Cherries, Blackberries, and Raspberries are fruiting and ripening - good stuff there.  Chard is continuing to provide in this otherwise barren garden greens period. I finally smartened up and put some woven seed trays over my latest sowings, the stuff that is covered is still there, the stuff that is not is being eaten by the bun-buns.  I need more of those trays!!  Spinach and all but 2 head lettuce sowings are gone.   Some of the Chard has been eaten as well.  Carrots and loose-leaf lettuce are protected.

One of my melons is sizing up.  I am so afraid a dog, rabbit, mouse, or slug will get to it before it has a chance to ripen and be enjoyed by us.

I made an attempt to shield it from critters, but it certainly isn't perfect:

The little watermelon does not appear to be getting any larger,  hoping it will surprise me with it's girth one of these days.

Today's harvest, minus the potatoes.....I will save those for tomorrow.

The true potato yields aren't know yet, but the grow bags delivered a mediocre harvest.  If an ideal harvest is 10:1, I was hoping for a 5:1 out of the bags.  Purple Viking performed the best, giving me a 4:1 ratio; the Red Gold would have been right up there if hadn't robbed them so early in the season.   It came in at 3.5:1.  Keuka Gold was a real disappointment.  This potato is very similar in character to a Yukon, yet it is said to be a high yielder.  That was not my experience.  2.5 lbs of seed yielded 4 lbs of potatoes.  Overall I need to find a way to up my overall yields.  Better soil fertility and increased spacing is probably the answer.

 Stuffed Squash recipe for Annie's Granny, and anyone else who may enjoy it:
(recipe courtesy of The Victory Garden Cookbook)

6 med. Summer Squash

1 med. onion, chopped
1/4 pound munster, in 1/4 inch cubes
1/2 lb sweet sausage, casings removed*
3 T butter
1 C fresh bread crumbs
2 T fresh parsley, chopped (optional)
1 T fresh tarragon (optional)
1/2 C sour cream

Halve squash and hollow out seeds/center.  Reserve and chop this scooped out bit.
Blanch squash, about 5 minutes.  (Optional ice bath to follow)
Brown sausage, remove from pan.  Cook butter & onions until soft.  Combine with reserved squash, meat, and remaining ingredients.  Fill squash and bake @ 375 for approx. 20 minutes in a greased dish.

* We always use Chicken & Apple Sausage in this recipe.  Whatever cheese & bread I have on hand goes in as well.

Life is Good

The day started off with this delicious Summertime breakfast:

I couldn't help myself from digging in the fingerling bed last night to see how things were coming along:

The remaining Cipollini Onions and were pulled and set aside to dry:

Tomatoes are cracked from the heavy rains, but providing a nice harvest each day:

Today we went blueberry picking:

The farmer was as sweet as could be.  I must return again for more berries, and a Christmas Tree!

And speaking of sweet, the honeybees were all abuzz:

We left when our basket was full, the 9 pounds of berries will stock the freezer well:

The ride home included stops for lunch, ice cream (for the kiddos), 

blackberries, raspberries, green beans, and corn.

What a great day we had.  Life is good.

New Potatoes

I wanted to try out a new "new potato" salad recipe, so I emptied a grow bag yesterday.  This is the bag I had done most of my robbing from a couple of weeks ago, so I wasn't sure what to expect for yields.

Here is one plant pulled, not bad right?  In total I ended up with  2 pounds, 4.2 ounces of spuds......

My wee one was excited to pull potatoes and box them, that is until she spotted a worm in the dirt.....and then she was worm collecting instead of potato collecting.  My 6 year old had zero interest what so ever.

Some of the potatoes were quite small, but they taste good anyway.  If I had left this bag be I probably would have gotten another 15-20 potatoes out of it...there were way too many potato buds, and small spuds to count.  For fun I cut the stems back and stuck some root masses back into a grow bag with fresh compost.  Not sure if anything will grow, but I couldn't resist!

(Look at all those Red Cloud babies in there!!)

I am content with the yields out of this grow bag.  I put in 4 or 5 seed potatoes and took out well over  2 pounds of new potatoes.  A mature harvest would have yielded even more......not bad for a bag full of dirt right?!?  (I don't think I will see a ten-fold yield of these babies, but things are already going better than they did last year.  And really- do I need 70 pounds of potatoes?)

The Final Product:

Garlic Potato Salad from Simply in Season

6 C new potatoes, cubed

(Boil until tender, about 5 minutes.  Drain and set aside.)

6 garlic scapes, or 3 cloves garlic* (minced)

 *( I used green garlic)

1 C green onions (minced)

1/4 C olive oil

2 T Balsamic Vinegar

2 tsp fresh rosemary (chopped)

S & P to taste

-Combine dressing ingredients in a large bowl and mix.  Add potatoes and toss to coat; Chill about 3 hours before serving.

This salad is different, a welcomed change from the usual mayonnaise based potato salad.  It has that garlicky-onion tang going.....Mmmm.  Best part is all but the oil and vinegar came from the garden.

Yum!

More photos from today, see post below (from earlier today) first.....

I ♥ U

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(Chioggia beet chips, they shrunk down quite a bit in the oven; they disappeared from the plate even faster though.)

We normally don't like beets unless they are in "chip" form, so I sprayed a cookie sheet, sliced the beet thin, then sprayed the beets with oil, salted, and baked until I smelled them and remembered I had done all the above.  Oopsy!  The experiment worked.  Wish I had 10 more out in the garden to 'chip'.  

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Here is what became of my 'buried treasure' (new Red Gold potatoes)...oven roasted in olive oil, sea salt, fresh dill, and fresh chives.   I wish I had more garden space to work with, it would be great to grow potatoes just for harvesting when new.  Ahhh, the dreams of the home gardener!

EDIT:  I can't believe I forgot to put this in again.  We went strawberry picking yesterday and it was a heavenly field of ripe, scented berries.  The birds were singing, and my daughter-the-diva was complaining.  (Usually it is my lovely boy who has nothing nice to say, but in an odd moment of clarity, he was happy!  He picked his little heart out and had nothing but pleasant words to share.)

We picked about 22 pounds in all, and I have been quite busy processing berries ever since.  Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam, Strawberry Ice Cream, and a bounty of quartered frozen berries to keep our smoothie addiction alive and well.  I still have 8 quarts waiting for me in the fridge downstairs, HELP.

Robbing the Cradle

That is 9.5 ounces friends.  I just sacrificed how many potential pounds of red potatoes to get 9.5 ounces!?!?!  Worst part is these must serve the four of us with dinner tonight.

I also got testy and pulled up an Inchillium Red, if only you could smell it with me...

I chopped the top and combined it with my two remaining garlic scapes for some garlic-lover's pesto.  (Or as us girls named it one night over a glass of wine, "Wicked Piss-ah Pesto".)  You New Englanders can appreciate that one right?   :)

Tomato Tally

I did thorough walk through in Tomato Alley  today after watering, and I was able to categorize the plants a bit after taking some notes.  The "big three" producers are Sungold, Polbig (DET), and Sibirskiy Skorospelyi (DET).  Sib. Skor. wins the 'biggest fruit' category so far, this is going to be one funky tomato:

The Costoluto Genovese is showing it's beautifully ribbed characteristics already:

One of my plants suffering from identity theft appears to be a plum.  The labeled Juliet tomato is just starting to set fruit, so I am wondering if this could be San Marzano or some other plum instead since it is much further ahead in growth:

So to sum it up so far, here is the official Tomato Tally; will the laggards catch up and out-produce the early leaders???

• Sungold (x2):  Too many to count
• Mystery Plum: 6+
• Sib Skor: 4+
• Polbig (x2): 3-6
• Green Zebra: 3
• Cherokee Choc: 3
• Amazon Choc: 2
• Costoluto Genovese: 2
• Juliet: 1
• Black Krim: 1
• Mystery, Mortgage Lifter, Burpee Big Boy Hybrid, Rutgers & Moonglow: A big, fat ZERO.

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Here are some other photos from around the garden.....some of the potatoes are in full bloom:

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I managed to find 2 uneaten strawberries in the yard today, it seems that one of the 4 areas planted has been overlooked by all furry creatures, and slugs!!!!

(Actually, the above statement is false, one of the berries has been tampered with- but not destroyed by little teeth.)

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Potatoes & Peas:

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Peppers & Alliums:

(My peppers are going no where fast, might be time for another fish feed.)

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This bed was cleared of all things that bolted, and half of the Kale:

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I FINALLY am having success with the Red Sails lettuce, YAY!!

On a less positive not my damn dog ate the apples off the tree that actually had more than one growing (and yes, in case you are wondering it is the same dog that eats the strawberries), Sawfly caterpillars have done some damage to the currant, and you saw what I have picked so far out of the 75 or more strawberry plants I have.  OH!!  And then there was that nest in the potato bed?  Well it grew and the mystery creature tunneled down a bit and broke stalks off a number of potato plants, and dug up the baby taters.  I chucked the broken plants in disgust and marble sized potatoes before thinking to take a picture, but here is what was left after I cleared the carnage:

The beans are soaking, a bamboo tee-pee has been erected, and I need to dig the inoculant out of the shed before I forget and sow without it.  It really has been a beautiful day to work out in the garden.  Other chores included 'hilling' the potato bags with compost and straw layers, a little weeding, some potting up, and some feeding were checked off the list today.

Many of the potatoe plants have put on quite a bit of growth this past week despite the cold evening temperatures.  Even the tomatoes appear to be happy being out in the garden in below average May temperatures.  Most plants are starting to flower out and a few varieties are noticeably bigger than the rest, mainly the Polbig, Juliet, and Sungold.  Lettuce seedlings are growing in nicely between the plants.  It is almost time to do another succession sowing for the greens.  I have some Claytonia and a Spicy Mesclun Mix to add to the next round.

(I put 4 plants under black mulch and they are in fact larger, though they are also early varieties so not sure which is the contributing factor- maybe both.)

The currants are really coming along, my mouth waters just looking at them!

Here are my apple babies (just a solitary fruit one the first tree, still a group remaining on the second):

And some great news:  my rhubarb has come to life- WOO-HOO!!!!!!!!

I am finding the obvious coloration differences in the mint I recently planted runners of interesting, the ginger mint is quite gold, the chocolate mint has dark colored veining and edging (which for some reason is not very visible in the photo below unless you really compare it to the traditional mint), and then there is the plain 'ol mint- just green!

I am growing quite impatient for all those peas to start producing.  I spied a few flowers out there today- FINALLY!  I was able to harvest a large amount of greens today, enough to get us through most of the week I think.......well, that about covers what is going on out in my little kitchen garden, what is coming to life in yours?