The Modern Victory Garden

Each Monday, Daphne’s Dandelions hosts “Harvest Monday” where everyone submits links to their blog posts summarizing their harvest for the week.   It’s interesting to see what everyone else is harvesting from gardens in many different regions.   I can never seem to get my act together to post on Harvest Monday’s but I sincerely want to try and participate more often and this week is a good one to get started with because the harvests are starting to ramp up (finally!).    Monday’s are always hopping busy for me, so I will actually be posting my Monday Harvest posts on Sunday evenings.                      

I did not get pictures of all that I harvested, but here is quite a bit of it.       

Harvest totals for the week of June 28th through July 4th (rounded to the nearest ¼ pound).

• Broccoli 0.50 lbs
• Cabbage 0.50 lbs
• Garlic 5.25 lbs
• Kale 0.50 lbs
• Lettuce 5.25 lbs
• Onions 0.25 lbs
• Peas (sugar snap) 0.25 lbs
• Potatoes 4.50 lbs
• Zucchini 0.75 lbs

Total harvest for the week is 17.75 lbs.                                      

Laura

kitsapfreedomgardener

While I appreciate a beautiful flower garden as much as anyone,   I honestly cannot bring myself to spend more than a passing amount of time and resources on flower gardens anymore.     There was a time where I devoted much more energy to them, but those days appear to be behind me.    My heart belongs to the food production garden because it has both beauty AND good taste!     So many vegetable and fruit plants put on such a nice flower show and then go on to produce food for our table.                       

Who needs a flower garden when we have our food production gardens that nourishes both body and soul?    

Each year I start more vegetable seedlings than I ultimately need in order to hedge the risk of plant losses that normally occur.   With tomatoes, I plant even more than that because over the years it has become a tradition to provide tomatoes for my staff and co-workers.                        

It has been almost two weeks since I planted out my own tomatoes and all of the plants are doing splendidly so it is safe to say that I no longer needed to keep spares on hand.   It was time to take my surplus tomato starts into work for the annual tomato plant giveaway.    This morning I packed up all but the plants earmarked for my sister and tucked them into the back of my Honda Fit.     

Had to make two trips with a wheeled cart to get them all transported into the building and set out on the conference room table.

Every single one of the plants was taken in short order; even one that got scrunched a bit in the transporting process!   I still have plants to get to my sister, but for the most part the annual tomato plant giveaway is now history for 2010!

In early January I received an email from Sheila De La Rosa editor of Oregon Home magazine asking if I would be willing to be interviewed by Margaret Foley for a segment in their regular Trade Secrets series – this particular article to be focused on growing victory gardens.   I am always interested in providing encouragement to others to grow more of their own food, so of course I was pleased to participate as requested.   A few weeks ago I received several copies of the April-May 2010 issue in the mail, which has the final article as completed in it.

You can read the complete article HERE.                                    

I am constantly amazed at the amount of daily traffic and interest this blog and website gets and it just keeps growing over time.   The interest level in food production gardening has definitely spiked up with the enduring recession and heightened awareness of how our daily "living" choices impact the environment and our personal economics.                        

A working kitchen garden has been a part of our household's routine since before we were even married - which is saying something because we will be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary on May 18, 2010!   While food production gardening has been part of our lives for a long time, the focus with the garden has changed over the past six years, in that I now actively work to provide 100% of our annual vegetable needs from the garden.   Before that time I did not put nearly as much planning into it and had less lofty ambitions (at least as far as meeting our family's food supply needs are concerned).   I think a greater amount of people are now ready to explore that same shift in focus or are ready to up their "garden game" to a new level for the sake of sustainable and frugal good living.   While the drivers of that increased attention are unfortunate and dire for those that are facing job loss or reduced incomes, it certainly has been positive in that people are discovering (or rediscovering) the real satisfaction that comes from having a greater involvement with working to provide one of the essential elements of daily living - food.                                                

I fervently hope that this surge of interest is long-lived and not just a passing fad.   How does your food production garden fit into your life and what are your personal goals related to it?

The weather has been very uncooperative all weekend.   Basically too wet to do much of anything outside.   Yesterday I did the seed starting and a couple of minor chores that needed to be done and before coming inside for the afternoon I harvested a small head of January King cabbage and some carrots.

The carrots were scrubbed and grated and the cabbage was cut into small pieces.   All of it was mixed together and dressed with my favorite slaw dressing to make a fresh and colorful coleslaw to go with Saturday’s dinner menu of roasted pork chops in sweet and tangy barbeque sauce and Boston baked beans.                

Today was just as wet so I dedicated some time for baking.   Along with bread baking, I decided to use some double dark chocolate cocoa I received as a Christmas present - to make a triple layer sour cream and chocolate cake.     

My cakes are not very beautiful to look at, but they sure are moist and good tasting!

A package arrived late last week and inside was a gift of a little homemade TLC to brighten up my winter months.   Annette from Sustainable Eats sent me a jar of her homemade body lotion.                                   

Wow!  This stuff is wonderful.    It really does a great job of hydrating the skin - making it feel smooth, and the residual faint scent of beeswax has me wanting to smell my own hands.    I had read her blog post earlier in December about making this body lotion and was properly amazed at how simple it sounded and yet would have never occurred to me to try to do such a thing.   Imagine my surprise when I was then a subsequent recipient of my very own jar!        

If you have not spent time at Annette’s blog, I would encourage you to go check it out.   Gardening is definitely part of the mix of topics, but is just one element of an overall effort of eating more sustainably.   She really walks the talk and is truly inspiring in her efforts.                                

Annette lives in the greater Seattle, Washington area and is just a short car and ferry ride away from our homestead.   I hope to be able to meet her in person later this year for a garden visit.    In the meantime… thank you Annette for the thoughtful surprise gift!

The living room is a jumble of treasures and surplus wrapping paper at the moment.   Several of the gifts I received were related to cooking and baking, but I did get a couple of gardening related gifts too - an amaryllis bulb planting kit, another pair of my favorite gardening gloves (Atlas Glove / Nitrile Touch), and a Flip digital video camera!         

I promise not to inundate you with too many videos, but I do plan to add an occasional video to the mix of items I post on the website in the coming year.   It’s going to take me a while to learn how to use it reasonably well before I will be ready to launch the first one.   Not much happening in the garden at the moment to capture on video anyways.   In fact, the most exciting thing at the moment is that the Mache (corn salad) has not only germinated in the half-barrel containers in the unheated greenhouse, but is progressing along nicely enough that you can see the sheen of green now.    

The kale and Chinese cabbage seedlings (in the shop under grow lights) are forming their first true leaves.   I will be giving these their first drink of very diluted kelp emulsion tea tomorrow.                        

Arriving before Christmas were some other treasures from two garden blog friends.                                                                        

Daphne of Daphne’s Dandelions sent me a packet of Market Miracle tomato seeds saved from her garden, and Dan from the Urban Veggie Garden Blog sent me several packages of seeds including; Double Yield cucumbers, Merlot lettuce, Red celery, and Cherokee Purple tomatoes.   I can hardly wait to get these started and grow them in the coming garden season.

I wish for everyone a Merry Christmas and a New Year filled with health, happiness, garden bounty, and daily doses of love and laughter.

I noted in my last blog post that it appeared I had some creature getting into one of the carrot patches – chewing off the tops of the carrots and pulling up several and gnawing them up quite well.  The little rascal was not even bothering to finish off the carrots that were pulled before moving on to pull up yet another!                             

Last night, I popped out the back door to let our elderly dog outside for a while and noticed that something was in the carrot patch.   The back porch light had been on so the adjacent garden beds (which is where the carrots are) were well illuminated, and luckily our old dog is so deaf and blind that she just ambled off and did not bother the creature - giving me an opportunity to quietly move up closer and get a good look without frightening him off.   I did not have my camera with me so I do not have photos to share, however, I think some Beatrix Potter illustrations will do nicely instead.

Yes, Peter Rabbit has braved the modern day equivalent of Mr. McGregor’s garden for a tempting meal of sweet, crunchy, garden fresh, carrots.   He was quite brazen and rather fearless as he continued to eat while I stood close by and admired his size and handsome pelt.   I must inform you that this is a well-fed rabbit and my carrot patch probably had a great deal to do with that!    

I have decided he may have the rest of the carrots in that particular section of garden as he largely topped them all already.   However, I am going to put some netting up over the remaining bed of parsnips and carrots as soon as I am home during daylight hours .  He has not found his way to the other main bed of root crops (yet) so I need to get some mechanical barriers in place to protect them from potential damage.   Netting is a good way to do this and does not hurt the animal in any manner - just blocks his access to the goodies.  There is only so far I can go with my generosity of sharing the garden abundance – after all, my family needs to eat too!                    

If you have not enjoyed "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" for a while, I would encourage you to read it online HERE.   As a vegetable gardener the beautiful story and illustrations are particularly appealing and timeless.

I often have the experience of people wanting to know the address of this website and blog and invariably the request comes when it is inconvenient to try and write it down on a piece of scrap paper (which is likely to get lost anyways) or a pen and paper are not available at all and then it is up the individual asking to then memorize and retain the information.    It seems that a business card with the web address on it would be a useful thing to have for just such circumstances.    Recently, Suzy at Chiot’s Run posted about Moo Mini Cards and I instantly knew this was just the solution for this problem and a nice way to display some of the more interesting photos from the site at the same time.                                           

They are a great size for carrying around and feature up to 100 different cropped images from photos you upload.   I chose to put the Modern Victory Garden website address, my name, and general location on the back of the cards.   I have already had an opportunity to hand a few of these out and think they will be very useful to have on hand.                              

The garden is in soggy wet winter mode right now.                     

The garden crops that are currently available for harvest include: carrots, parsnips, kale, swiss chard (greenhouse), lettuce (greenhouse), brussel sprouts (almost done though), cabbage (January King and a little bit of Beira Tronchuda is left).   I have had some critter getting into one of the carrot beds, pulling up roots and gnawing on some of them.   Not sure what kind of creature specifically is doing this, but I wish he/she would be less wasteful and just eat what they pull up rather than leaving it partially gnawed on!   I have an abundance of carrots in the ground in several different plantings, so I am not feeling any compulsion to try and put a stop to it.                     

Coming along behind the current harvestable crops, are some secondary plantings that will not be ready until February or March at the soonest. In the greenhouse, I have mache (corn salad) that I planted in two of the three half barrels. Mache is a slow plant to germinate and grow, but is well worth the effort.   It is hard to see in the following photo but I am getting a good coverage of mini mache sprouts in the two containers.

In the shop, under the grow lights and on the heat mat, I have some kale, Chinese cabbage, and lettuce seedlings that have emerged.    I planted these up last weekend.                                               

The lettuce is not giving me very good germination (both varieties).   I think the seed may be losing some viability due to age.   Probably time to toss the lettuce seed and replenish with fresh seed stock.                           

I am hoping to get started on my shop project over the coming holiday weekend.   I am designing a simple planting spacer tool that will help me to quickly plant larger sections of garden beds - but still utilize proper spacing when direct seeding.   It’s just an idea rattling around in my head right now. I want to do a prototype of the idea and work out the kinks before moving on to creating the final planting tool.                     

What are you working on or doing in the garden right now?

This year’s preserving efforts had a few new recipes and a return of some old favorites.   I thought it might be fun to do a follow up to the previous posts and let you know what my judgment is on how several items turned out. 

In the totally new to me category there was pickled jalapeño peppers and spiced red cabbage relish.   We just opened the first jar of the pickled jalapeño peppers this evening and gave them a try.   Wow!   Those turned out very good.   I am glad I added the crushed red pepper flakes to the recipe because the peppers were not very hot this year and the red pepper flakes added a really nice heat.   This recipe (as modified by me) earns big thumbs up.   Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the spiced red cabbage relish.   I opened the first jar of this several weeks ago and could not even finish the first spoonful.   Yuck.   This recipe earns a big thumbs down and I am going to have to just empty the remaining jars out before someone injures themselves trying to eat some of it.   Yikes!                      

In the old favorites category we had dill pickle relish, pickled beets, and dilly green beans. True to form, these old standbys delivered to expectations.   I have to say though that I had forgotten how much I love dilly green beans. Once a jar is opened, it gets consumed almost immediately.   Nothing like a crisp croccantini flatbread cracker with a schmear of fromage blanc and then topped with a crisp dilly green bean. The spicy heat of the bean is complemented by the smooth creaminess of the cheese.  Heaven.           

So there you have it.   With the exception of the horrific spiced red cabbage relish, the rest of the specialty preserved items turned out wonderful.   If you used that spiced red cabbage relish recipe because I posted it…. you have my most sincere apology!