4/10 Harvest - Overwintered CA Veggies

This week's harvest is from the California garden.  I suppose you could call all these vegetables "over-wintered," although coastal southern California winter is nothing like winter in Indiana (or anywhere with snowy winters).

Red Russian Kale

Red Russian Kale has been growing really well.  It has been a true cut-and-come-again workhorse in the garden, very unlike bok choy and tatsoi that only yielded one harvest before going kaput.  I noticed that this kale grew more green in California compared to in Indiana where it grew a bit more red/purple, even though the seeds all came from the same place.  I think it has to do with the temperature.  I seem to remember reading somewhere that freezing temperatures make the red/purple color more pronounced in Red Russian Kale.

Cilantro

Fall-planted cilantro grew throughout the winter, but it has finally bolted.  The bolting doesn't seem to have changed the flavor of the cilantro, so some of the lower leaves were harvested.

Bolted Cilantro

Flowering stalks from bolting cilantro seem to grow at lightning speed.  These bolting cilantro "trees" are at least 4-5 feet tall.

Bolted Cilantro going to Vegetable Heaven

If we needed more cilantro, more of these leaves could have been harvested.  But one can only use so much cilantro in a week or two, you know?

Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard

After a slow start, swiss chard has been growing fairly well all winter/spring.  The problem with chard is that pests (birds/bugs, I think) love them and seem determined to turn them into swiss cheese chard, although this picture shows off mainly non-holey leaves.

Sugar Snap Peas

Here's the last harvest of the sugar snap peas planted last fall.  The vines were very productive all winter and spring, but they have finally reached their limit.

Sugar Snap Peas for planting

These dried pea pods were discovered as the spent sugar snap pea vines were pulled from the garden.  Although I didn't mean to save any seeds, I guess these peas just saved themselves by hiding in the middle of the thick vines.  I just learned from the internet that all peas are open-pollinated, so these peas will be saved to be planted in the garden this fall. 

Short 'n Sweet Carrots

See the carrot on the left side of this picture?

Front

Here's the front side view of the carrot.  Doesn't look so bad, right?

Back

The back side is a whole another story.  This carrot grew right next to one of the paver stones, and I think it must have grown around/under it, hence the 90 degree angled indentation in the middle, and a few extra lumps.

Happy Harvest Monday!

Fall Radishes - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

These pictures are from a few weeks ago while I was in California.  It was my first chance to harvest the Cherry Belle radishes since first planting them about 35 days ago.  I knew that was about 10 days past their normal days to maturity, but I was hoping that cooler temperatures and shorter daylights of late fall would work in my favor and not negatively affect the radishes too much.

Well, I can always hope, right?

While a bit on the small side, here are The Good.

Then we have The Bad.

And we have The Ugly.

I have read that uneven watering and being left in the ground for too long can cause radish cracking.  I've also read that under- or non-development of roots may be caused by overcrowding, temperatures being too hot or soil deficiencies.  But I'm still puzzled because all these radishes were grown in the same part of the garden sufficiently/evenly spaced away from each other.  Whatever water/light/soil nutrition these radishes might have been lacking, they all got exactly the same treatment, yet some fared much better than the others. 

Oh well, I guess it's just another proof that vegetable gardening is anything but predictable.

I am happy to report that whatever problems the radish roots were having didn't affect the green tops at all.  They all grew beautifully and were rather delicious tossed into some soup.  It was my first time eating full grown radish greens, but I'm sure it won't be the last time.

Fall Vegetable Gardening in Southern California

With Halloween just around the corner, there's no denying that the holidays are not too far away.  I've been busy this week trying to finalize several different travel plans involving multiple trips "all over the country" (five states in three different time zones count, right?) while attempting to coordinate with many different family members' holiday plans as much as possible.  But that's almost all done now, so back to blogging!
 
Since there isn't much going on in the Indiana garden right now, I'll provide an update on my California garden.  Yes, I call it my garden now, instead of my mom's garden.

Last time I was in CA, I weeded the whole side garden and added some more soil/compost.  I also put down some 12 inch paver stones so that I could walk across them and reach the back part of the garden, because it was almost impossible to reach the part of the garden against the wall without breaking my back while kneeling/squatting on the concrete side path.

This is what the finished garden looked like.  After my aggressive weeding, the only thing left in the garden was the cut-and-come-again lettuce mix.

Side profile of the new and improved garden

This side garden is approximately 4 feet wide by 24 feet long.  After I finished preparing the garden, I planted it with all kinds of seeds for cool-weather crops: radishes, sugar snap peas, cilantro, parsley, carrots, parsnip, kale, bok choy, tatsoi, mustard, swiss chard, spinach, lettuce, etc.  According to my CA peeps, the garden has fully germinated and is now full of lots of healthy two-week-old seedlings. 

Cherry Belle radish seedlings

Daikon radish seedling

The seedling pictures - taken with an iPhone camera - are courtesy of my sister, whom I've been bugging to email me some picture updates of my garden babies. 

 Sugar snap pea seedlings

I'll be visiting CA again in a few weeks and will provide more updates then.  It's really exciting to have a "new" fall garden to look forward to, while my Indiana garden (a bust this fall anyway due to all kinds of evil garden pests) is hunkering down for the winter.  We're expecting our first frost tonight in Indiana.  In contrast, I think the average daytime highs in my California garden will remain around 60 - 70 F degrees for most of the winter, with the nighttime lows around 40 - 50 F degrees.  As a new vegetable gardener, I totally have a newfound appreciation for the mild climate in Southern California!

10/11/10 Large Carrots

This week's harvest is brought to you from my California garden (aka mom's garden space where I sowed some seeds earlier).  The last time I was here, I pulled a few impressive girthy carrots. I harvested the rest of the carrots this weekend, and I continue to be amazed at how well these carrots grow here, especially compared to the puny ones I've been growing in my Indiana garden.  They all came from the same seed envelope.

My attempt at a carrot bouquet

These are all "Short 'n Sweet" variety.  I'm thinking this one is more like "Long 'n Scary"

Or is this the scary one?

All these carrots came from this part of the garden (you can see the green carrot tops in the middle, before the harvest), which, as you can see, is fairly weedy and a bit disorganized by my standards.  Apparently these carrots like it better that way, compared to the pristine controlled environment of my square foot gardening beds in Indiana.

Here is the final carrot harvest after they've been bathed and groomed.  This harvest weighed 3 lbs, with the largest one weighing 13 oz.  I wondered if such large carrots may be compromised in flavor and/or texture, but these were still very juicy and sweet with no woody center core like some big carrots from the grocery store.  Curious, but, hey, I'll take it!  I grated the first few big ones to make some impromptu whole wheat carrot bread, in an attempt to avoid the sweet/rich pitfall of carrot cake.

Hop on over to Daphne's Harvest Monday for more fall harvests!

This post is also linked to Tuesday Garden Party.

Nasturtium Mystery

I planted a nasturtium seed in this container the last time I visited my mom in California.  It is now blooming, even though the plant itself is still pretty small.  There are also some weeds (including what looks like the beginnings of poppy seedlings) in this container as well.

Anyway, the only significance of this is that while this nasturtium grew and flowered in about two months, the nasturtium I grew in Indiana never flowered once this summer/fall, even though that plant has been growing for longer and got much bigger than this one.  They came from the same seed stock.

How strange.

I thought that nasturtiums were supposed to be pretty easy to grow everywhere.  I wonder if I did something wrong that caused my Indiana plant to not flower at all this year.  Or do flowers somehow prefer California over Indiana, at least for flowering purposes?

Does Your Dog Eat Vegetables?

My sister rescued this dog from the streets of Los Angeles about a month ago.  She took him to a shelter first, where she learned that due to over-capacity issues, the shelter would most likely have to euthanize any new dogs that didn't get adopted out within a few days.  Well, that was completely unacceptable to her, so she did everything she could to try to find the dog's owner.  She put up flyers.  She put up ads.  She went door to door in her neighborhood.  When none of that worked, she then tried to find a new adoptive family for this dog.  When that also didn't work, she went back to the shelter and adopted the dog herself, intending to extend his life while she kept looking for a suitable new family for the dog.  But then she got attached to the dog.  So she named him Wilson (like the "lost" volleyball from the movie Cast Away), and she's now keeping him for herself.

Wilson is a mutt, but apparently he looks most like a Shiba Inu. Yeah, he's a cutie, and he has an adorable pink spot right above his nose.

I met Wilson for the first time while I was back in California about two weeks ago.  Compared to all the other dogs I've known well in my life, Wilson is very well behaved, quick to learn commands, and rather easy-going.  For example, my sister trained him to sit outside her kitchen while she's in there, so that he wouldn't get in the way and beg for food.  And when she brought him over to our mom's house, she taught him to do the same thing outside my mom's kitchen, which he learned to do in just one day.  If Wilson ever met Reese (one of our dogs in Indiana), Reese would ask, "but how would you ever eat anything that fell on the floor during chopping or cooking, if you're just sitting outside the kitchen?"

Speaking of eating, this dog eats VEGETABLES!

After I pulled some girthy carrots from my mom's garden, I brought one in the room to show my sister.  Wilson seemed a bit curious about the carrot, so I tore up some green carrot top and gave it to him, fully expecting him to sniff and turn his nose at it.  But to my surprise, he looked, he sniffed, he touched, and then he ate it!

He looks like he's sleeping in this picture, but he's not.  His eyes are closed because either he was straining himself to tear a bite-size piece from the carrot top, or the camera flash scared him. 

I took him with me to the backyard to harvest more vegetables, and he ate everything I gave him.  He ate some sugar snap peas, zucchini, lettuce and carrots.  His only issue was that he wanted me to cut/slice them into bite sized pieces, like he didn't want to go through the trouble of breaking down the food himself.  What a (cute) weirdo.

"I'm ignoring you."

"Oh, you have more vegetables for me?"

"I'm going back to sleep."

8/16/10 Harvest - California Garden

This week's harvest is from my "other" garden at my mom's house in California, where I spent this past weekend and thoroughly enjoyed some civilized weather (highs in the 70s, lows in the 60s) after enduring months of brutal heat in Middle America.  Anyway, I sowed the seeds for carrots, sugar snap peas, and zucchini about three months ago during my last visit, along with some onions sets.  That plus asking my mom on the phone how "my vegetables" are doing once a week is about the extent of my involvement with these vegetables.

The onions didn't size up much.  The sugar snap pea vines are about 3/4 dead (brown and brittle), but the remaining 1/4 of the vines are still putting on new growth, blossoms, and peas - they just keep going like the energizer bunny!  The zucchini plant has gotten very big and is just about covered with powdery mildew, but they are still growing new fruits.  The carrots just amazed me with their size.

Look at these carrots!  I discussed the Girthy Carrot on Saturday.  After pulling the largest carrot, I stopped at five, because I didn't know what my mom would do with so many big carrots all at once.  There are still another dozen or so of these in the ground.  Ugh, why can't I grow carrots like this in my garden in Indiana, instead of the puny little matchstick ones? 

I didn't sow these seeds, but this salad mix is also from my mom's garden.  All kinds of lettuce seem to grow really well here, pretty much all year long.  It's kind of bizarre, really.  I would love to give credit to my mom for having a green thumb, but I honestly don't think that she does - she still waters everything from the top with a garden hose!

Visit Daphne's Harvest Monday for more harvest stories.

Girthy Carrot

This is the girthiest carrot I've ever seen.  And I grew it!  Well, sort of.

While I was visiting my mom in Southern California during Mother's Day weekend, I sowed some carrot seeds in her side yard.  So I can take credit for starting them, but not much else.  Fast forward three months, and I'm back in CA this weekend with a chance to check on *my* vegetables again.  And holy carrot, this is one girthy carrot!

These seeds came from the exact same envelope of Burpee's Short 'n Sweet carrots that I sowed in my Indiana garden.  My first Indiana carrots made their debut two weeks ago, with carrots the size of matchsticks.  I don't know why these carrots are growing so well in California, but not in Indiana.  Maybe they like the unusually cool CA summer this year (with highs around 70s so far this summer), compared to the hot 90+ F summer we've been having in Indiana?

Sugar Snap Peas in California vs. Indiana

Back in early May, I visited my mom in Southern CA and sowed a few sugar snap peas in her small side yard.  Later that same week, I sowed more of the same peas - yes, I traveled with my seed envelope - here in our garden in Indiana.  Fast forward two months, and take a look at the difference between the two pea patches:
 
Indiana peas:

and California peas:

Our Indiana peas never really had a chance, what with the wild bunnies first nibbling the seedlings down to sad little nubs, and then getting toasted extra crispy in this heat in the last month or so.  I got two whole sugar snap peas out of my 16 plants last week.

The California peas, on the other hand, have been enjoying the unusually cool spring/summer weather for the last two months, and there are no wild bunnies in my mom's densely populated urban neighborhood.  I'm told that the pea vines have been growing like mad, already outgrowing the 4-foot trellis and reaching for the sky.

I know now that early May is too late to sow peas here in Indiana.  I will definitely start earlier next spring.