11/8/10 Harvest After The First Snow

We had our first snow on Friday, although it didn't stick.  Temperatures dipped down to the mid-twenties on Friday night, but I'm happy to report that what little left of the asian greens in the garden (with emphasis on little) survived the cold night.

These are the survivors, including a lone radish.  First, they survived the relentless attack of the cabbage worms (but not without battle scars consisting of big holes and missing chunks of leaves), and now they have survived their frost and snow.  I stir-fried these greens for lunch.  They were really tasty, but so little in quantity to just barely whet our appetites.  I really need to figure out a way to grow these better and to protect them from pests next year!

Also surviving frost and snow are some volunteer parsley that have been growing for the last two months.  They seem really hardy and healthy in the outdoor garden.

I supplemented this week's garden harvest with some cilantro and basil from our indoor grow box.  A single Jelly Bean tomato (also from the grow box) somehow made its way onto the harvest plate, too.  I chopped up the cilantro and mixed it in with some freshly cooked brown rice.  They added a nice flavor to the rice!

I also picked the last handful of green beans from the grow box.  While it was kind of cool to find out that we could grow green beans (bush variety) in our grow box, I have to admit that they were still very cramped in there and did not grow to their full potential.  I'm not sure if I'll grow them again in the grow box.

The harvests are definitely getting smaller, but we really appreciate every little bite that makes its way into our kitchen.

Check out Daphne's Harvest Monday to see who else is still harvesting in November!

10/18/10 Harvest Still Trickling In

We're only a couple of days away from the average first frost date in Indianapolis, but it looks like we may be lucky enough get through the rest of October without seeing any frost.  This would make for a very warm October for our area.  The weather was really beautiful this weekend with the daytime highs in the 70s.  Keith and I took advantage of this by taking a Saturday evening walk to the neighborhood liquor store (0.6 miles from the house) to buy some beer (the cashier looked at us a little funny when Keith put the beers in his backpack) and then enjoying a Sunday morning stroll before breakfast to admire various elaborate Halloween decorations around the neighborhood.

In the garden, the warm weather has allowed another handful of Jelly Bean tomatoes to ripen on the vine.  The plants themselves are looking pretty sorry and bare, but as long as the tomatoes stay edible, I won't complain.

In addition to the Jelly Bean tomatoes, this week's harvest included several more ripe cayenne peppers, a few sugar snap peas, one small radish and some green beans (both green and golden).  The green beans were our first harvest from the bush beans currently growing in the indoor grow box, so we were pretty excited to add green beans to the list of our grow box vegetables.

I also harvested two salads' worth of baby lettuce.  I don't know why they look so pale in this picture, but they looked normal in person.

Oh, I also harvested another serving's worth of asian greens.  I might have had two servings' worth, but the cabbage worms took their share before I got there.  I know, because I picked 15 fat and happy cabbage worms off of my greens.  Well, they were probably happy before I picked them off and drowned them in a container of water.

Bok Choy: If this is not rude, I don't know what is.

I also tackled the mass of basil growing in the garden.  Basil is probably the number one thing that grew like weed in the garden this year.  Next year, I will grow fewer plants.

Here's about one pound of basil.  I made a triple batch of pesto, and am currently in the process of air-drying the rest of the basil leaves for future consumption.

Currently Growing in the Indoor Grow Box

After a few cold nights last week, I thought, this is it, the first frost must be just around the corner!  Then it started warming up again, and the weather people are forecasting daytime highs of 70s and low 80s for the next six days.  I'm hoping this will be good for the remaining green Jelly Bean tomatoes to plump up and get ripe enough for me to pick before the first frost, whenever it arrives.  On the other hand, I wonder if this kind of warmth is not so good for my fall crops, or at least whatever's left of my fall crops after the ongoing cabbage worm and aphid attacks.  One thing for sure, this up and down fall weather is definitely keeping me on my toes.

In the meantime, we still have a few things growing in the indoor grow box, where they are happily oblivious to the changing weather outside.  In addition to indoor Jelly Bean tomatoes and planted basil cuttings, we have:

Long Thin Cayenne Pepper, with some peppers finally starting to ripen red

bush green beans that are just starting to set flowers

cut-and-come-again lettuce mix

catnip that I planted just to see if some freebie old seeds were still viable (they were)

By the way, I have no idea what to do with catnip, since we don't have a cat and don't know any neighbors who have cats.  I have read that they can serve as a deterrent to a variety of garden pests, but I haven't tried it yet.

cilantro that I've already taken some cuttings from for making salsa

flat-leaf parsley from self-collected seeds

and finally rosemary that I grew from seed.

8/9/10 Harvest and Grow Box Jungle

The harvest this week was rather small, in quantity as well as in vegetable sizes.  Our Early Girl tomato plants are still producing tomatoes, but individual tomatoes seem to be getting smaller every week.  My spreadsheet tells me that I'm not just imagining this problem.  Hmm, would some fertilizer help with this problem, or is this normal for growing tomatoes?

The bush beans squeezed out a few more green beans, because I just couldn't bring myself to pull the three remaining ratty plants that still had some blossoms left last week.  Maybe next week.

The cucumber plants gave us only one cucumber this week, but I spotted several baby cucumbers on the plants, so hopefully we can get more cukes in a week or two.

Although our harvest was pretty dismal this week, our plants are growing really well in the indoor grow box.

 Indoor Grow Box Overview 8/8/10

On the top shelf, we have basil, cayenne peppers, jelly bean tomatoes, and some cilantro (started just last week).  When I started the pepper and tomato seeds in the grow box about a month ago, it was just an experiment to see how well the grow box would work to germinate seeds.  But they have been growing so well that I'm starting to wonder if we might get lucky and actually get some peppers and tomatoes out of them this year.  We transplanted a few of the seedlings outdoors, just to give them the best chance to grow during the rest of this season.  The remaining plants, we'll keep inside the grow box for as long as we can and see what happens.  I just spotted what look like tiny pepper blossoms starting to appear, so yeah, I'm totally getting my hopes up!

Are these really the beginnings of pepper blossoms?

In the middle, we have nasturtium and several different kinds of cut-and-come-again lettuce, including arugula.  Would you like to see the difference between indoor and outdoor nasturtium?

Nasturtium in the back; the rest are lettuce and arugula

More Lettuce

On the bottom shelf, we have some more experimental seeds, a new flat of spinach seeds (not yet germinated), and a few rosemary seedlings with a serious growth problem.  Okay, I know it's not fair to compare rosemary with fast growing annuals like cucumbers or green beans.  I did read that rosemary is hard to germinate from seed, and very slow to grow; but I had no idea that it would be this slow!  These seeds were sown in May, so they've been growing for almost three months now, and their heights range from 1/4 inch to barely an inch.  They are really testing my patience, but hopefully I'm more stubborn than they are.  Eventually, I really would like to have a rosemary bush (or even several) that I could point to and say, "I grew that from seed!"

Three Month Old Rosemary Seedlings

Happy Harvest Monday celebration continues over at Daphne's Harvest Monday.

8/2/10 Harvest and First Homemade Pizza

Harvesting was really fun this week, with six tomatoes, five cucumbers and a bunch of small but still edible onions.  The green beans are still trickling in a few at a time, and basil is mass producing at a rate where we can hardly keep up.

We also pulled up three carrots for the first time, and they were teeny tiny - only about 1 inch long and thinner than an infant's pinkie.  They are Burpee's Short 'n Sweet variety, with 68 days to maturity and full size of up to 4 inches.  I sowed these carrot seeds about two and a half months ago, so I don't know why these carrots are not getting any bigger in our garden.

If you want to see other gardeners' harvests, head on over to Daphnes' Harvest Monday.

* * * * *

This weekend, I decided that I was finally going to learn to bake bread-y things using yeast.  Up until now, I have always just skipped recipes that included yeast because I somehow thought that they would be too difficult.  But heck, if I can learn to grow my own vegetables, I can certainly learn to use yeast, right?

So I made a pizza from scratch. I did everything by hand the old school way, since I don't have a stand mixer or a bread machine.  I learned to make a pizza dough, double rise and all. I wanted to incorporate as many garden vegetables as I could, and ended up using homemade basil pesto, green onions, onions, tomatoes, green beans and oregano.  Other non-garden ingredients included chicken, mushroom, garlic, and mozzarella cheese.  The result was a oh-so-delicious pizza that came out the oven perfectly hot and crisp, not even a tiny bit soggy.  Success!

A question for those of you with more baking experience: are there any bread recipes where a stand mixer or a bread machine is a requirement, or is it always just an easier alternative to hand-mixing?

7/26/10 Harvest and Indoor Grow Box Update

Presenting, our very first tomato!  The variety is Early Girl, and the tomato plants were grown from seedlings bought from a garden store before we figured out how to start our own seeds.  As far as the taste is concerned, I would say that this one tasted slightly sweeter than an average store-bought tomato, with that good wholesome home-grown flavor.  I'm sure there are many other tomato varieties with better flavors, and I hope to grow more varieties from seed next year.

We also harvested a few more green beans, but I think we're done with these bean plants for the season.  They have been under some sort of a beetle attack - I think cucumber beetles, but there may be other bugs involved as well - and the leaves are getting rather lacy and ratty-looking.

Cucumbers are continuing to produce.  We harvested four more this week for more cucumber salad, and the vines promise many more in the upcoming weeks.


Indoor Grow Box Update

Our homemade indoor grow box has been performing beautifully, and we harvested some baby lettuce from our first trial run.  Three weeks ago, we planted a variety of lettuce seeds in a Jiffy mini greenhouse and a re-purposed container (one of those clear plastic containers that hold supermarket strawberries).  They started germinating after 2-3 days, and three weeks later, we already have some edible baby greens.

Encouraged by our success, we constructed a few more lettuce "beds" from doubled-up aluminum lasagna pans.  The bottom pan was filled with a layer of pea gravel to hold up the top pan.  We poked some drainage holes in the top pan and filled it with Mel's mix (equal parts peat moss, vermiculite and compost).  Now we'll be able to grow cut-and-come-again lettuce all year long indoors without worrying about them bolting in the heat or freezing in the cold outside.

The few seedlings in the pictures below were transplanted from the Jiffy mini greenhouse into one of the new lettuce beds after some of the bigger leaves were cut for our first lettuce harvest.

At the same time that we started our lettuce seeds (three weeks ago), we also started some jelly bean tomato and cayenne pepper seeds in the Jiffy mini greenhouse.  I know that's too late to start tomato and pepper seeds, but we wanted to experiment and see how seeds would germinate and seedlings would grow in our indoor grow box.  There's also a transplanted basil growing in there, too. So far, everything seems to be growing pretty well.  The tomato and pepper seedlings were transplanted into separate containers last week.

Inside of the grow box before the first lettuce harvest

If you haven't yet, do you want to see how we built this indoor grow box ourselves three weeks ago?

Check out Daphne's Harvest Monday for everyone else's harvests!

Cucumber Beetle on My Beans?

I didn't know what this little yellow insect was when I made Keith hold still so I could snap a picture, but thanks to Google image search, I have now identified it as a cucumber beetle.  A spotted cucumber beetle, to be exact. 

According to the experts, cucumber beetles got their name from their tendency to be found on cucurbit leaves and flowers.  The last time I checked, green beans were not part of the cucurbit family.  So what was this bug doing on my bean flower?  I suppose it's possible that it was just enjoying a rest stop en route to cucurbitsville - I do have cucumbers and squash in my garden - but it was crawling around the bean flowers for a while and it didn't look like it had any plans to leave the bean area anytime soon. 

Could cucumber beetles have done this to my bean plants, or is this masterpiece a courtesy of some other unsavory garden pest?  Do any of you readers know if cucumber beetles are exclusive to cucurbits, or if they sometimes venture out to other plants like beans?

Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, I made sure to get rid of this particular cucumber beetle by relocating it to the concrete patio and stepping on it mercilessly.  I know you can get the job done easier by simply dropping the bug in soapy water, but it was more satisfying this way.  Much more.

7/19/10 Harvest - First Cucumber

Happy Harvest Monday!

Following last week's first zucchini, we're continuing with our garden "firsts."  Making its grand debut this week is our very first home-grown cucumber.  The variety is Burpee's Sugar Crunch Hybrid.  Our cucumber was not as "fat" as the model cucumbers photographed on the seed packet, but it looked to be about the right length, so we picked one for a test run.  It tasted great - sweet and crunchy.  Here it is, presented with the rest of this week's harvest.

We harvested some yellow onions that haven't sized up to what I think should be their full size potential.  We planted these onion sets pretty late in the season (mid-May) so I don't know if the bulbs will grow anymore.  We'll probably pull a couple every week and see if they get any bigger.

The green beans seem to be slowing down, and some bugs are starting to get to them, too.  If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see the blemishes on the beans better.  We definitely need to plant more beans next year.

The red pepper is cayenne, and it was gifted to us from our next door neighbor.  It was his first pepper.  We cooked with it tonight, but the heat just wasn't there.  I thought cayenne peppers were supposed to be super spicy?

We also harvested about 4.5 oz of basil to make pesto.  We ran out of pine nuts, so we used some walnuts and almonds instead.  The pesto still came out tasting really good.

Our first cucumber was sliced along with my TSA-inspected cucumber from Texas and our not-quite-big-enough yellow onions for a refreshing cucumber salad marinated in vinegar/sugar goodness.  It was sweet, tangy, and crunchy with just the right amount of kick from onions - absolutely perfect.

7/12/10 Harvest Monday

Welcome to another episode of  Daphne's Harvest Monday!

I finally have over ONE pound of harvest in a week.  And I will freely admit that the squash blossoms pushed me over that 1 lb mark.

Zucchini:
It's my first home-grown zucchini!  I know most people have "problems" with their zucchini plants being too prolific, but I was excited to get my first full-sized zucchini this week.  I actually hand-pollinated this one with a small brush last weekend, because I wanted to make extra certain that this female flower got pollinated, after seeing another female flower, along with its embryo zucchini, just wither away and die two weekends ago.  I'm guessing that's what happens to female squash flowers that don't get pollinated.

Squash Blossoms:
I've been reading about fried squash blossoms.  Edible, cookable flowers?  Heck yeah, I had to test this out for myself.  Unfortunately, I only saw two blossoms that seemed fit for harvesting on Sunday, so I ended up with just two.  I prepared a beer batter according to one of the recipes I found online, and fried up the two blossoms.  The verdict? Well, let's just say that there's room for improvement.  There was nothing really wrong with them, but I just wasn't overly impressed as I had hoped.  Maybe my expectations were too high.  Or maybe my frying technique needs more practice, as I hardly ever fry anything. I will try this again before I give up completely.  Does anyone here have a good recipe for squash blossoms that they would recommend?  I also sliced up my one zucchini into coins and sticks and fried them up using the same beer batter.  But I discovered that the batter was just too thick/heavy for the zucchini.  I really need to work on my frying skills and recipes.

Green Beans: 
There was another handful of green beans this week. We are loving growing (and eating) our own green beans.  We made a note to plant many more beans next year.  We may even try multiple varieties.  The one we planted this year is Burpee's Blue Lake 274.  Do you have any favorites that you would suggest we try next year?  These beans got sauteed in a little bit of olive oil with some garlic for Sunday dinner.

Oh, I also harvested another female flower/baby zucchini after watching it closely for a few days and not seeing it grow any bigger compared to my hand-pollinated zucchini (above) that grew about 1-2 inches every day.  There wasn't much to eat on this baby zucchini (it was about a finger length), but I suspected that it didn't get pollinated, so if I had left it on the plant, it would have just met the same shriveling death as its sister did two weeks ago. I just sliced it and ate it raw in two bites, while Keith watched and wrinkled his nose in anti-zucchini disgust.  It tasted just like a regular zucchini.

In other garden news, I'm slowly getting over my squeamishness over all things buggy, and have been bravely picking off any creepy crawlies of pest persuasion from my vegetable plants.  Just this weekend alone, I removed a yellowstriped armyworm and an unidentified bright green caterpillar from my bean plants, and four Japanese beetles from my basil.  All of them were quickly smooshed dead by the bottom of my unforgiving shoes. 

Yellowstriped Armyworm eating its last meal

Is This Powdery Mildew?

As the growing season progresses, I'm starting to discover more pests and plant diseases that I've only been reading about until now.  Can someone tell me if this is powdery mildew on my squash leaves, or something else? There are numerous white spots spread all over the leaves.  Also, the whole plant has been getting more yellow-green the last week or two.

(click on all pictures to enlarge and see the spots better)

And what about these white spots on my cucumber leaves?  They look very different from the white spots on the squash leaves. Does anyone know what this is?

And lastly, there are holes on my bean leaves.  I thought the culprit was japanese beetles, but I found a different pest today.  Yellow striped armyworm, I think?

7/5/10 Harvest Monday

First an update on last week's Green Onion Experiment:

They are growing!  Slowly, yes, but all the green onion root stubs from last week are making progress.  In the picture below (click on photo to enlarge), you can see tiny bits of green starting to come up from the 1/8-inch long root stubs that I cut off from three full-grown green onions last week.  The root stubs from green onions thinnings, which were cut longer at around 1 inch each, have green growth of more than an inch already. The rest of the large green onions in this pot have been growing for about two months now from 2-inch root stubs of supermarket green onions.

I harvested the rest of the full-grown green onions from this pot.  Unfortunately, some of the white bulb parts got mushy and infested with onion maggots (ewwww), so those got tossed.  The rest of them look good enough to eat.

I also got a couple (yes, only TWO) of tiny sugar snap peas from my pea plants that I thought were dead.  And the bush beans are starting to produce some green beans.

One of these days, I hope I will actually harvest more than a pound of veggies in a week.  I get such a huge case of vegetable envy every time I see mouth-watering pictures of other people's large and colorful harvests.

See Daphne's Harvest Monday for other veggie growers' harvests.

My Garden Crops

My garden started out as a full house. A house full of seeds, that is. Couple of months ago, I went seed shopping and picked out a bunch of seed packets that promised to grow into yummy looking veggies. I came home with two handfuls of seeds, and went all out planting them. All of them. Without regard for proper planting times.

Oops.

The good news is that some of them are now growing. Fairly well, I might even add.
Look, zucchini is flowering! One of the female flowers got pollinated (I hope) and it looks like I might get a zucchini out of it (see picture). The other one (not shown) seems to have died a quiet, shriveling death. The rest of them are all male flowers. I need some girl flowers, quick!



The green beans are flowering as well, and growing teeny bean pods. Before I started my vegetable garden, I would have never thought that a few one-inch green beans could make me so happy. But they do! Very much so. I've been staring at them for longer than I'm willing to admit. Multiples times already this morning (I secretly believe that lots of visual attention aid their development.).



Cucumber is flowering, too, but no sign of any baby cucumbers yet. Maybe I'm not staring at it long enough?

Sadly, it's not all good news in the garden family, and some didn't quite make it. Sugar snap peas fought against the rising temperature, but did not survive multiple attacks from the local clan of wild rabbits. Same story for lettuce, spinach, and arugula.

The rest of the crops seem to be in some sort of a trial period where they are still deciding whether they want to stay put and grow, or give up and die. Carrots, peppers, onions, and chives are in this camp. Ugh.

I'm also growing some herbs that are growing and flowering out of control. I gave up on trying to corral them. I'm not sure what happens to them once they flower. Questions for the experts out there: what do I do with the perennial herbs (oregano and thyme) after they bolt? Can I leave them alone and they will just keep on growing after the flowers turn to seed? With the annuals (cilantro and basil), I assume that once they bolt, their harvesting season is over and they will just die. And what about parsley? Here is a picture of my flowering herbs:

cilantro - white flowers; parsley - yellow flowers; oregano - purple flowers

Whatever their future holds, at least the bees seem to love them right now. Next time, I think I will grow all my herbs in containers, which will hopefully control their growth better. I'm already doing that with my basil, and they are doing pretty well, except for some mystery holes.