9/6/10 Harvest - HOT Pepper

We harvested our first hot cayenne pepper this weekend, just to test its hotness.  Keith took a quarter inch nibble off the tip, thinking "it's still green and unripe, so it can't be that hot, right?"  Then he almost died.  His exact quote afterward was: "It tasted like firey death."

I just took the cut side of the pepper (after Keith took his nibble) and touched the tip of my tongue to it.

WHOA.

This was one hot pepper!  It tasted hotter than any other peppers I've tasted in recent memory.  I have read that hot peppers get a bit milder when they are ripe and red.  We'll have to do another taste test when the peppers are bigger and riper.  A question for any of you pepper growers out there: do you ever harvest cayenne peppers when they are still green, or do you always wait until they have turned color, either partially or completely?

The rest of our harvest was pretty wimpy this week.  We finally got the last of the cucumbers and pulled the vines.  The cucumbers were small, distorted and damaged by bugs; but they were still edible.  I also harvested two green onions I grew from seed.  These things really take forever to grow to a decent size from seed.  There are more in the garden, but we only needed two for cooking, so that's we took.

Since I didn't have much of a harvest this week, I wanted to share a few colorful pictures from our Labor Day barbeque.  The produce was unfortunately not from our garden, but Keith and I have high hopes that we will be able to supply our own vegetables for next year's Labor Day weekend barbeque.
 

We also grilled some chicken breasts and pork chops, but I don't have any pictures of those because I was already too busy eating my burger.  Priorities, you know!

Please visit Harvest Monday for other gardeners' harvests.

8/30/10 Harvest - Salad Fixings

We had a very small harvest this week - just some baby lettuce mix and arugula grown in our indoor grow box, and probably the last few cucumbers from our slowly-but-surely dying cucumber vines.  This lull between summer and fall is turning out to be kind of depressing!  Now I have to wait patiently for my fall crops to start growing.

I harvested the baby greens (and reds) from these two containers.  I thought I took a picture of the harvested lettuce, but apparently I forgot to do it.  It wasn't a lot of lettuce, just enough to make two appetizer-sized salads.

I spaced out and did not remember to take a picture of my harvested cucumbers until after I sliced them all up.  My loud "oh no!" probably made Keith think that I cut my finger with the kitchen knife or something.  With the way that our brown and brittle cucumber vines look right now, these may very well be the last cucumbers of the season.  We'll see if we get any more next week.  Otherwise, adiós, garden cucumbers.  See you next year.

I made some tzatziki with these cucumbers, garlic, lemon juice, salt and plain yogurt.  Various recipes said that greek yogurt works the best, but all I had in the fridge was plain yogurt, so that's what I used.  It still turned out pretty yummy, if a bit too garlicky.  That's what happens when you just wing it without following a recipe!

Oh, I almost forgot.  I also harvested about 16 oz of basil.  1 lb of basil doesn't sound like a lot, but it's really a lot of basil.  They filled up a huge serving bowl.  I took all the leaves off the stems (so tedious) and laid them down to dry, as we have enough frozen pesto cubes for now.  They filled up three large pizza pans and four cookie sheets.

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

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.

8/9/10 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!

Naughty Talk

 

Some couples indulge in phone sex - or sexting, if they are hip and young - when they are apart.  Not us.  We discuss our vegetables.

 

"My co-worker gave me another cucumber today."

 

"Another big one?"

 

"Almost as big around as last time, but this one's less than half as long.  She thinks that it hung down too low, hit the ground, and couldn't grow anymore."

 

"Ours don't hit the ground."

 

"That's good!  That means our vertical trellis is working."

 

"We can get it up and keep it up?"

 

"Oh yeah."

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.

Flying With A Large Cucumber

"Ma'am, we're going to have to do a manual inspection of your bag."

"Okay."

"Is there anything dangerous that could poke me in your bag?"

"Just a cucumber."

The TSA inspector narrowed his eyes at me, like he thought I was kidding.  What, like he hasn't seen someone fly with a cucumber before?

Yesterday, one of my co-workers brought in these cucumbers that she grew in her home garden in Denton, Texas. I've seen cucumbers bigger than these in length before, but certainly not ones with such... girth.  I guess it's true that everything is bigger in Texas.  I won't get into the details about all the vegetable porn references that were insinuated during our group excitement of measuring and photographing.  Totally workplace inappropriate.

12-inch ruler and pad of paper for size comparison 

Another co-worker took the bigger one and I got to keep the smaller one.  The smaller one is about 10.5 inches long, 9 inches around, and weighs in at just under 2 lbs.

Every Friday after work, I fly back home to Indiana, so this cucumber had to fly home with me.  Since I didn't check any luggage, I stuffed this cucumber in my travel purse.  And they flagged me for manual screening because "something" didn't look quite right on the airport security X-ray machine.  I suppose they couldn't tell that it was a large cucumber in the bottom of my purse.  Maybe it looked like something else. Like... a large zucchini?

Anyway, the TSA inspector carefully took everything out of my purse, one by one, and finally got to the cucumber.

"I told you I had a cucumber in there."

"Um... yep.  That's a cucumber alright."

"Is it okay if I fly with it?"

"You sure can.  You're all clear, ma'am.  Have a safe flight."

So I traveled home safely with my TSA-approved cucumber.

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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?

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.