10/25 Harvest - Indiana Carrots and Alfalfa Sprouts

These are the last of my Indiana carrots.  Due to their super slow growth and my impatience, it's been about two months since I pulled all the carrots in my square foot gardening beds except for one square foot, and these came from the last square foot.  These carrots have grown more in the last two months, but they are still pretty small compared to my California carrots - all the carrots you see here added up to 11.2 oz, and the biggest carrot from my last California harvest weighed 13 oz all by itself.  Oh well, I'm not complaining too much, though, because something is better than nothing!

I also got my first sprout harvest using the 3-Tray Kitchen Sprouter that I recently won in a giveaway on the Cheap Vegetable Gardener's blog.  This sprouter was pretty easy to use, and I got about 2-3 cups of organic alfalfa sprouts from the first test drive.  Keith and I enjoyed our first taste of these home-grown sprouts on our sandwiches this weekend.

Apparently there are lots of different kinds of seeds that you can buy online to grow different types and flavors of sprouts, including sprouts from seeds that I hadn't thought of like broccoli, kale and mustard.  I'm excited to try some new and interesting sprouts besides the typical alfalfa.  If any experienced sprouters have any suggestions or recommendations, please let me know!

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.

9/20/10 Harvest - Jelly Bean Tomatoes

It's another Harvest Monday with two more firsts in our Indiana garden: a carrot of semi-respectable girth and the debut of Jelly Bean tomatoes.

We only have one square foot of carrots left, since we pulled all the other slow growing carrots about a month ago.  We pulled one of the few remaining ones this weekend to see if the micro carrots benefited from the extra month at all.  It looks like the extra time helped this carrot's girth a bit, but not its length.  I continue to be unimpressed with these carrots...

Here are the first two ripe Jelly Bean tomatoes.  One is much larger than the other, but they both ripened at the same time.  I was hoping for more than just two, but these were the only ones ready this weekend.  The tomatoes had fairly thick skin for grape tomatoes and the flavor was on the sweeter side of tomatoes.

We still have many more Jelly Bean tomatoes at various stages of ripeness and dozens of flower clusters on our four experimental Jelly Bean tomato plants.  These were started late this summer after we built our indoor grow box.  I'm hoping that there are enough warm days left in the season for a good majority of these tomatoes to ripen.  The weather has been rather inconsistent lately.  After months of brutally hot summer, it got cold really fast a few weeks ago, but now it's getting hot again, and we're expecting a high of 95F this Tuesday.  I'm sure the tomatoes are just as confused as I am.

The last part of our tiny harvest this week consists of herbs: basil, oregano and thyme.  Keith used these herbs plus lots of other spices and seasonings to make a rub for his roasted pork loin.  It became Sunday dinner with my leftover spaetzle.  If you've never had the pleasure of tasting homemade spaetzle (no, that stuff from a box doesn't count!), I invite you to view my Homemade Spaetzle Recipe post for pictures on how to make this delicious German noodle dish.  You may even be inspired to make it yourself.  If you do, you won't regret it!

Spaetzle with Emmentaler/Gruyère cheese and caramelized onions

Makings of roasted pork loin with garden-grown herbs

Please visit Daphne's Harvest Monday for more harvest pictures!

8/23/10 Harvest - Summer to Fall Transition

There have been many changes in our Indiana garden during the last two weeks while I’ve been gone.  Unfortunately, the common theme of these changes appears to be death.  Well, I say “unfortunately” but I suppose this is all part of the natural garden cycle, the inevitable transition from summer to fall.

Early Girl Tomatoes: the tomato plants have been croaking, slowly but surely.  There were still a dozen or so green tomatoes of all sizes left on the plants, but we decided to pull the plants to make room for fall planting.  I understand that green tomatoes picked at their full size will most likely ripen red.  Do immature green tomatoes picked before they reach their final size still ripen eventually?  I guess we’ll find out.

Do you like Keith's artistic presentation of our green tomatoes, plus one red?  I sure did!  That one red tomato actually ripened to that color on the vine, even though the tomato size stayed tiny.

Keith picked these three tomatoes last week as they were just starting to blush.  They had already ripened to this deep red color by the time I got home this past weekend.

Cucumbers: the bottom half of the vines look like they are completely dead - brown and brittle.  However, the top half are still green, and putting on more growth and cucumbers.  We decided to let them live for another week.

Yeah, I know, these cucumbers don't look all that fresh or healthy.  They were picked last week and they are in their it's-been-one-week-in-the-fridge condition in this picture.

Carrots: the Indiana carrots were a total bust this year, very much unlike their girthy California cousins.  Or are they siblings, if the seeds all came from the same seed envelope?  Anyway, we pulled all the carrots from our square foot gardening beds, except for one square that we left alone to see if they would get bigger with more time.

This was "only" about a third of our total harvest.  I'm going to spare you more pictures of our micro carrots.

Onions:  these onions from sets never really sized up properly.  We also discovered that one onion (from a bag of 100 yellow onion sets) was actually a red onion.

Green beans:  our late-spring planting of green beans squeezed out their last harvest about two weeks ago.  We attempted successive plantings of bush beans, but the later plantings of bean plants just got eaten up alive by the cucumber beetles and other evil vegetable-eating bugs, and the new leaves just couldn't grow properly without turning completely hole-y from bug damage.  I gave up and pulled all the remaining bean plants to make room for fall vegetables.

Zucchini: I started out with three zucchini plants this year.  100% germination rate from three seeds, so I thought I was off to a good start.  All three plants grew well and fast.  Then came powdery mildew.  Long story short, I ended up with one zucchini the whole season.  Ugh.

That’s pretty much it for all our spring/summer vegetables.  The only plants still left growing outside are herbs (basil, sage, garlic chives, thyme and oregano), some green onions and our experimental plants in five-gallon buckets:

• SUPERmarket cantaloupe: grown from seeds from a generic supermarket cantaloupe
• Jelly bean tomatoes: grown from seeds started in the indoor grow box
• Cayenne peppers: grown from seeds started in the indoor grow box
• Mystery plant: we thought this was possibly a bush-type of Hale’s Best Jumbo cantaloupe, but our more experienced garden blogger friends tell us that it looks nothing like any Hale’s Best Jumbo they’ve ever grown, so now we have no idea what it is.  We have now had at least two readers comment that it looks like a weed, possibly in the mallow family.  I am completely baffled.  Could I have been pampering a useless weed for the last two months, in a five-gallon bucket?  Yikes.  If you would like to take a look and tell us what you think, we would very much appreciate it!  Whatever it is, I sure hope it's edible. 

Visit Daphne's Harvest Monday for more harvests from other gardeners.

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?

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?