The Modern "Victory Garden"

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!

Spent a few hours puttering in the garden, shop, and greenhouse today.   The weather is overcast but generally fairly warm (54 degrees as of 1:30 this afternoon) so it is an ideal day to do some garden chores.   Took care of some routine items such as mixing and turning the compost piles and watering the seedlings in the shop (as well as the crops in the greenhouse) with a fish emulsion tea.   The day length will be creeping up in the days and weeks to come and the various greens will benefit from a shot of light nutrition to help them kick up the growth.             

Another task I got to was a salvage operation for the bed of overwintered spinach.   I planted them last fall in a portion of one of the beds in the newer section of garden – next to a green manure crop of crimson clover.   It’s in the mid-section of the lowest main bed in the following picture.               

I have two problems going on with that planting.   First, the germination was spotty and so there are some fairly large bare patches in the planting area.   Second, the wild rabbit that has been raiding the carrots and the cover crop of crimson clover, has also been mowing down the young spinach plants as well.   Despite all that, there is a good scattering of very young spinach plants in the bed and I want to salvage as much of them as I can for an early spring crop.    The first order of business was to take a few minutes and do some weeding to get rid of large weeds that had gotten a foothold established.   Once the largest of the weeds had been disposed of, I then mixed up some fish emulsion tea and gave the entire bed of tiny spinach starts a quick drench.   The final step was to get them under a grow tunnel cover to protect them from any further rabbit damage and to give them a warmer, more protected environment to encourage new growth.   If you look closely at the next picture, you can actually see the small spinach seedlings in the area that has the PVC hoops set up over it.                          

Over the hoops, some plastic sheeting was then put in place.   I reuse the plastic sheeting over and over again, so it is not always very clean looking.   When it is not in current use, I fold them up like blankets and store them in the shop on a shelf.   The plastic is anchored to the PVC hoops using “A” type clamps that I keep on hand for that purpose.   They are inexpensive and last for years and years.   Occasionally using a little 3 in 1 oil on the springs is a good idea, as they get rusty over time and with exposure to the elements.   These clamps are about due for a little oil treatment.               

Now the bed is under cover and should hopefully be able to rejuvenate and grow on more successfully.                              

In the older section of the garden, I have another grow tunnel cover in place – this one protects the main bed of over wintered parsnips and carrots.        

I opened it up this afternoon long enough to dig up some carrots and parsnips for tonight’s dinner menu.                              

I trimmed the tops and root tips off while still in the garden so I could just toss them directly into the compost pile.   A rinse under the spigot and they were ready to go inside - where they will be peeled and/or scrubbed and then roasted with nothing more than just a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt.   

The January King cabbages looked pretty ragged right after our period of deep freezes in December but now they have really bounced back.   The cabbage heads are starting to get some good size on them.                       

Did not get to my shop project this weekend at all.   Decided instead to wait until next weekend to get going with it - since it is a three-day weekend for me and I will have a little more time to devote to it.   Next weekend I will also be getting the first of the 2010 seed starting efforts underway.           

Did a general walk through of the entire garden making a mental note about items that will need some attention in the next several months.

• I have several beds that will need to have compost added to them this spring but unfortunately, I am not going to have enough finished compost to cover all of it.   We expanded the garden fairly significantly last year and I need to increase my compost production to provide for the extra amount of growing beds.
• Around the end of January, I need to turn over the green manure crops of crimson clover to let them have sufficient time to decompose before the beds are needed for planting.
• I have decided to construct some grow beds in the greenhouse – using up leftover timbers from last year’s garden expansion project.   I just barely have enough materials on hand  to do this, and only if I continue using the 3 half whiskey barrels I already have in the greenhouse.  However, going this route will help me avoid the expense of buying 4 more half whiskey barrel planters.

By steadily working on these items over the coming weeks and months, the garden will be ready for the big rush of spring planting without undue wear and tear on me.    I much prefer to pace myself through the various garden chores that need doing each season.     Do you have some "pre season" chores lined up to do this year?

The weather gave us a bit of a break the past two days.   It has been overcast and cool but no rain, and it has been warm enough for the past few days that the soil is now unfrozen.   I took advantage of the respite and got outside today to take care of a few things in the garden.   The primary objective was to clean up one of two beds of carrots that have been plundered by our marauding rabbit.   I only tackled one this weekend because it is too cool to spend more than few hours outside at a time.   If the weather cooperates, I will similarly clean up the other bed next weekend.     

The bed I worked on was the newest of the vertical grow beds.   It had Mokum carrots growing in the front 1 foot of bed area – down the entire length of the bed.   This variety of carrot is particularly nice for fresh eating and we have been using them from mid summer up until just recently for that purpose.   As a consequence, there really were not too many carrots left in the bed by the time the rabbit found his way to it.   What was there though, he has been damaging with abandon.   I used two large 5 gallon buckets for the job.   One was for the damaged carrots and debris, which were destined for the compost heap.   The other was for carrots that looked to be in good condition as I pulled them from the soil.   A garden fork was used to then work my way up the bed, loosening the soil and then removing the carrots.                                                                             

For every 1 carrot that looked good – 2 (or more) were damaged.   The bucket on the left is the “looks okay” stash, and the bucket on the right is the clearly damaged group.                                          

The carrots were washed by swirling some water in the bucket until the bulk of the dirt was removed.   The muddy water was poured into the compost pile and then a further cull was made pulling out carrots that had insect or rot damage that was not readily apparent when covered with soil.   When all was said and done, I ended up with just over one and half pounds of good carrots salvaged from the bed.   Probably had about four pounds of carrot debris that went into the compost pile.                                  

I raked the bed smooth after the carrot removal process and then dumped 3 full buckets of really good finished compost across the surface.                

I then smoothed the compost out over the surface so that it provided about a ½ to 1-inch layer over the entire bed.                       

This bed is now empty and amended.   I also did a little weeding in a few other beds and put away some hoops that had been left in place but were not being used.   I have several other beds that are now empty and also need compost added to them.   Over the course of the next several weeks, I hope to get to each of these and get them taken care of too.   It was nice to spend a few hours outside today.   However, I was ready to come in and warm up by the time I wrapped up for the afternoon.   There may have been a break in the weather today, but it IS still winter out there!

Daphne at Daphne's Dandelions regularly hosts a "Monday Harvest" post whereby everyone shares their harvest for the week.   Up until today, I have not participated in this weekly event (although I always enjoy reading about everyone else's harvests!) because I generally do not have pictures of everything I harvested over the course of the week and my Monday's are usually just too wickedly crazy.   However, I decided to join in this week because Daphne made a genuine plea for participation to chase away the winter blahs and put visions of tomatoes and spinach  in her head for the holidays.              

No tomatoes or spinach, but will some fresh kale and crisp cold carrots do? 

Harvested Sunday afternoon.    The ground was frozen solid for the first two or three inches of the soil and the kale has been through several freezes too.   The result is that the sugar content is quite high in both the carrots and the kale - quite yummy!                                     

I harvested brussel sprouts on Christmas Eve day as well, but unfortunately... no pictures of that harvest to share. 

Between my crazy work schedule this past week and a string of significant rain/wind storms that have pummeled our region,  I have been unable to get very much time in the garden of late.   However, today (at least for part of the day) we got a brief let up in the weather and I was able to get outside for a while and enjoy a little “garden time”.   My cat Sid joined me and immediately went to spend some quality time with his potted catnip plant.     

He loves having his own special “cat” garden!   The herbs in pots (including Sid's catnip) will move into the greenhouse when the weather starts getting down to freezing levels at night.   Right now we are hovering in the mid 30’s to low 40’s for night time temps but it will not be long before we see some colder temps.        

Amazingly enough, the raspberries are continuing to ripen.               

I picked about a half cup of them this afternoon to snack on later.   I also took a little time to remove the leaves of the western red cedars that have been dropping into my onion bed - creating a fairly thick mat over the entire bed.  Once removed, I was able to really see how the onion and garlic were doing so far.   The Walla Walla onion seedlings I planted earlier this fall seem to be holding their own but are not showing much top growth.   I hope they are busy working on building a strong root system instead.   In that same garden bed, the garlic (both elephant and regular) are sending up their initial shoots, and so are the multiplier onions.                           

In the greenhouse the onion sets I planted up are starting to emerge too.  The multiplier onions and the onion sets will both provide green onions early next year about the time the storage onions have run out.               

Did not get to spend a very long time outside today because the break in the weather was actually quite brief.   Another storm system is settling in with gusting winds and rain.   Before going inside, I harvested enough broccoli side shoots to use for the evening meal prep.   There is only my husband and myself for dinner tonight (daughter is babysitting today), so we only need a small amount.           

This afternoon I processed yet another pumpkin.   It was one of the smaller sized ones and provided 4 cups of puree.   I used 2 cups immediately to make a pumpkin pie with and froze the other 2 cups for future pie making needs.   We are not hosting the Thanksgiving dinner this year, but will instead be going to my sister and brother in-laws house in Tacoma for the meal.   My contribution will be several pumpkin pies made from our garden grown pumpkins and cranberry sauce made from some fresh northwest grown cranberries.   I have several more storage pumpkins yet to process and will be doing at least one more this week to make the Thanksgiving pies from.                              

Are items from your garden going to make it to the Thanksgiving dinner table this year?

The temperature dipped down to 34 degrees last night.   There was frost on the deck railing but nowhere else to be seen.   Still, the combination of really wet and colder conditions has taken its toll on the Jalapeño pepper plants in the greenhouse.    They still looked really robust and healthy …              

… however, a closer inspection revealed that the growing tips were moldering, a sure sign that the plants were giving it up for the season.           

They were still carrying a significant amount of fruit on them, but they were not going to grow any more without some warmer temperatures.   This afternoon, I stripped the plants of the remaining peppers and removed the plants altogether.   The final harvest of fresh peppers for 2009 yielded just under 3/4 of a pound.            

I then used my garden cutters to remove the tree like plants and composted the vegetation debris.                                       

The emptied containers were then seeded with Corn Salad (Mache).            

These greens will not be ready until February or March but will be much needed by that time when the rest of the winter harvest is depleted significantly.   In the meantime, I have some nice looking swiss chard in the greenhouse pots.         

In the main garden, the bed of lettuces is still going strong too.                

And the celery plants are still producing beautifully.                

The heads of Ruby Ball cabbages are looking rather waterlogged from our soaking fall rains, but are continuing to grow and hold the promise of some good eating to come.                                              

Harvested some parsnips and carrots a day or so ago.                  

I am using some of the parsnips this afternoon to make Cornish Pasties for dinner.   The parsnips (3 medium sized ones) are peeled and cubed and then combined with diced onion (1 medium), peeled and cubed potatoes (1 large potato), and lean pork cut into small cubes (I used one large pork chop).   The meat and vegetables are sprinkled with a tablespoon of flour, some beef bouillon granules (equivalent of one cube), 1/3 cup of catsup, and a little water, then stirred until well coated.   This is allowed to marinate in the fridge for an hour.   At which time it is spooned into rolled out pastry dough circles given a sprinkle of salt and pepper and then the crust is folded over and sealed shut creating a turnover.   Bake at 375 for 45 minutes.

Are you using items from your garden (fresh or preserved) in your dinner prep today?

Spent a large part of the day in the house doing some cooking and baking.   Among other things, I made a large batch of whole-wheat dinner rolls.   I have not made any kneaded yeast breads in quite a while, but despite the lack of practice they turned out beautiful - light and soft textured.   Enjoyed some of them with dinner tonight but the rest are destined to be frozen in small batches for fast weekday meals.   I also baked a peach pie today using one of the two packages of frozen peach slices.                      

I did get into the garden for a bit today.   In fact, this afternoon I harvested the last big head of Steins Late Flat Dutch cabbage and some carrots.            

Half the head of cabbage and all of the carrots were used to make a vegetable side dish for tonight’s dinner.   Not sure what I will eventually end up doing with the remaining half a head of cabbage – but it keeps very well in the fridge so there is no rush to use it.                            

While outside I took a picture of the broccoli patch.  It is getting close to being done for the season.   There is at least one more harvest of side shoots to be made before pulling the plants up and composting them.            

I have been harvesting from these broccoli plants for several months now, so I definitely got good utility out of the mid-summer planting.   You can probably tell from this photo that we have been getting a lot of rain and wind over the last several days.   The garden and yard are both littered with leaves, evergreen needles, and small branches and everything is thoroughly soaked.   If it ever dries out a bit, I will need to do some raking and clean up work.   For now though, the weather encourages more time inside the house and a little less time outside in the garden.                           

However, despite the rainy, cold, and wet weather, our hardy fuchsia bushes are still blooming prolifically.                                   

You can see the red ones in the background, but these dark and light pink ones are really very exotic.   I love these bushes because they grow reliably year after year and have such showy blooms from the late summer well into late fall.   At some point we will get our first hard frost or freeze and these will be knocked down.   Until then I intend to enjoy them.                        

All in all it was not a very exciting Saturday, but enjoyable nonetheless because it was slow paced and yet productive too.   Sometimes it is nice to just putter in the kitchen for a large part of the day.

Tuesday was my birthday and because it was mid week, we kept to a simple celebration of a nice dinner at home.   I harvested the first of the 2009 brussel sprouts so that we could enjoy some young sprouts sautéed in olive oil and butter along with our stuffed pork chops (bread stuffing with herbs, dried cranberries, onions, and mushrooms).   While the pork chops were wonderful, the brussel sprouts were the real highlight of the meal – tender and sweet.                  

With the full onset of fall, fresh picked garden produce for the evening meals are less frequent and an increased amount of preserved or stored items are being put into use.   I have to force myself to use preserved items and not over harvest the fall/winter crops by leaning on them too hard and too early.    I much prefer fresh produce over frozen or stored, but the fall and winter crops are essentially in a state of suspended growth (brought to maturity before the short cold days slow the growth to essentially nothing) and will not replenish once harvested.   It is important therefore, to pace the usage of the fresh produce supply so that it provides a steady supplement to the pantry and freezer items all through the coming months.   For the month of October (to date) fresh harvested produce was used in approximately 50% of our dinner meal preparations and frozen or stored items in the other half.   That’s pretty typical for us during the fall and winter months and is a good pace of consumption of both the preserved/stored items and the fall and winter crops. 

Now I am just going to have to exercise restraint and try to keep some brussel sprouts available for Thanksgiving!

Fall has arrived with a grand flourish.   The Japanese maple trees in the front of our place have turned a flaming red - almost glowing in the gloomy overcast conditions we have been experiencing for the past several days.     

The garden crops are now almost exclusively fall and winter items with the exception of the pepper plants that continue to flourish in the protection of the greenhouse.   Yesterday I pulled the first of the 2009 parsnips and a few carrots to fix for dinner.                                                      

These were sliced up and sautéed in butter until tender and sweet.   Not the biggest specimens but I was trying to do a little thinning and pulled some roots that were too crowded.                       

My husband and I spent several hours today prowling around the waterfront shops in Poulsbo.   We also stopped at Valley Nursery hoping to find some Heritage raspberries to purchase so we could fill in where some of our spring planted bare root stock did not thrive.   Unfortunately, they did not have any Heritage plants and I really was not willing to settle for anything else.   I ended up buying a large bag of purple onion sets while I was there - but no raspberries.   When I got home, I planted about 24 of the onion sets next to the fall planted multiplier onions.       

The peppers in the greenhouse have been continuing to do well and the Early Jalapeno plants in particularly were in need of some harvesting.   Late this afternoon I picked quite a few of them and a handful of ripe mini bell peppers.         

Since I have several bags of sliced and frozen peppers and several jars of pickled peppers, I decided to roast these peppers first before freezing them.   The peppers were split and the seeds removed and then placed on a hot grill until the skins began to char and crack.                    

The peppers were then immediately placed in a brown paper bag that was then sealed shut and allowed to sit for about 10 to 15 minutes.   When removed from the bag the peppers were ready for the charred skin to be easily peeled off.               

The mini bells are not a very meaty pepper so the removal of the skins was a little less than easy but the Jalapeno peppers roasted up nicely and the skins came off quite handily.              

 The aroma of roasting peppers is really quite wonderful.   I could not resist them and ended up eating a few as I was doing the grilling.    Scrumptious!   These will be nice to have for future meals.

I updated the September harvest tally this morning.   I keep a spreadsheet that recaps the daily harvests and it makes it pretty easy to do this monthly update.   The only challenge I have been encountering in tracking the harvest - is to actually remember to weigh things before I use them for meal preparation or snacking!   I can assure you that the berry tally is grossly understated because of this.  

You can see the details of the harvest recap HERE.   The total poundage for September was a sizeable 266 lbs, which brings the year-to-date total up to 545 lbs.   This was a particularly high weight month because I harvested the remaining potatoes, pumpkins, winter squash, and corn.   I have never bothered to track production like this before, so it has been an interesting and illuminating exercise.   While it is definitely exciting and gratifying to see large harvest results for certain crops - I think it is important not to focus on sheer volume as a measure of success in the food production garden.   More important to me is whether our Modern Victory Garden:

• Produces a sufficient variety of foods to keep our menu options robust and our appetites peaked
• Produces a good yield per square foot of bed space
• Provides enough of each vegetable to provide our yearly needs with maybe a little extra to share
• Produces fresh food throughout the year - even in the winter months as a supplement to the preserved items

Thinking about the garden's results in those terms provides some interesting feedback and points to areas where improvements could be made.       

SUFFICIENT VARIETY

I would give the 2009 garden an A minus in this category. Expanding the garden this year was a big help.                                 

(new beds shortly after construction - spring 2009)             

The addition of three new large beds and a new vertical grow support bed added a considerable amount of additional bed space that allowed me to use some of the older beds for perennial plantings and to add some items that were only grown occasionally before  due to space limits (like corn).   In fact, in this category I think I have erred on the side of having too many different items when I should probably increase production or add back some favorites and forego some of the "we like it well enough but don't love it" items like beets and kohlrabi.   We always eat them and they never go to waste.   They are fun to look at and grow.   But the truth is, none of us really adore them and I would probably be better served to use the bed space for something we would consume with more gusto.                    

GOOD YIELD PER SQUARE FOOT OF BED SPACE

I would give the 2009 garden a B grade in this category.   The Buttercup squash were beautiful and heavy fruits (are great tasting too!) - but averaged just a little over one fruit per plant.                       

(fall 2009 Buttercup squash & pumpkin harvest)           

Big space user and not that great of a yield for the space occupied.   I think I will grow Butternut next year which is a significantly heavier producer with much the same eating quality and characteristics of Buttercup.   I will probably grow fewer plants though as we really do not need much more winter squash fruits overall - just better yield per space used.   On the plus side of the scoring though, the Butte potatoes were prolifically productive and will get a bigger allocation of space next year as a result.   The horizontal pea trellis experiment also greatly increased my shelling pea production and will be used again next year.                            

(shelling peas growing on horizontal trellis support)            

PROVIDES ENOUGH OF EACH VEGETABLE FOR OUR YEARLY NEEDS

I would give the 2009 garden a B minus grade in this category.  It would have been an A plus were it not for the tomatoes going down to blight just as the harvest was ramping up.  I was forced to purchase some tomatoes from the farmers market to supplement because this is the second year in a row that we had a less than adequate tomato harvest and my family was probably going to rebel on me if we went yet another year with limited tomato products.   I think every other crop has produced a more than sufficient quantity to meet our seasonal and yearly requirements.    Things I plan to do differently next year to try and turn this into an A plus score:

• Going to space the tomatoes further apart which means there will be less plants per bed but they will get better air circulation.
• Going to remove the smaller containers from the greenhouse and replace them with 4 more half whiskey barrels to add to my current 3. Of these, four will be planted up with tomatoes and 3 will be peppers.   I had too many pepper plants (which thrived in the greenhouse) and no back up tomatoes in the protection of the greenhouse to fall back on when disease hit the plants in the outside beds.
• Planning to use a regimen of organic fungicide spray on the tomatoes.

PRODUCES FRESH FOOD THROUGHOUT THE YEAR

In this category it is a bit premature to give a final grade yet.   I will go out on a limb though and say that I think this will be an A plus this year.   The carrots are particularly beautiful and I have four different (quite large) plantings of them that are mature and going into the fall / over wintering period at optimal size.     

(carrots and parsnips in the fall garden)             

The parsnips are bigger sized and the germination and yield were better this year.   The winter cabbages are further along and should be a good food supply this fall and again in late winter early spring.   I have several swiss chard plants in pots that are ready to move into the greenhouse to provide fresh greens throughout the season.   The kale is maturing and should be ready just when everything else is starting to give up or be over harvested.

So the poundage results are good and the overall report card on my personal Modern Victory Garden expectations would indicate a B plus performance for the 2009 garden so far.  

Is your food production garden meeting your goals and expectations this year?