11/1/10 harvest - Fall Salad

With the temperature rapidly dropping in Indiana, the garden offering seems to be shrinking.  This week, I barely managed to harvest enough lettuce, parsley, Jelly Bean tomatoes, and one radish to make two dinner salads. 

The salads were topped with some home-grown alfalfa sprouts.  Although the harvest was small, I did have a proud gardener moment when I realized that everything on these plates came from our organic home garden (pat myself on the back).  After taking this picture, I further dressed the salads with some sunflower seeds, golden raisins, slivers of goat cheese and a drizzle of balsamic vinaigrette.

Head on over to Daphne's Harvest Monday for more fall harvests from other gardeners!

P.S.  During my first year of vegetable gardening this year, I have learned my lesson that a part - okay, MOST - of the effort of keeping an organic home garden is dealing with a huge variety of garden pests.  Even after the arrival of the first frost late last week, I'm still seeing yucky pests in the garden.  I picked off (effective) several cabbage worms on my asian greens and rolled my eyes at (not effective) the aphids on my lettuce.  At this point, I've pretty much given up on the battle against the garden pests, at least for this year.  I'll be better prepared next year with row covers and a variety of different organic pesticides like Bt.  Enjoy it while you can, bugs!

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.

Waiting for Fall Lettuce to Grow

Ruby Lettuce

Red Romaine Lettuce

Little Gem Lettuce

Here we have lots of little volunteer lettuce seedlings (among some others) coming up from seeds that fell off the seed heads when I saved lettuce seeds, or they just self-seeded themselves.  They are mostly loose-leaf blend and mesclun lettuce mix.

Saving Lettuce Seeds

I have to admit that I did not intend to save lettuce seeds this year, mainly because the thought just didn't occur to me.  But my late-spring planted lettuce all bolted quickly when it got too hot early this summer.  One day, my cut-and-come-again lettuce patch just started shooting up these tall flower stalks.  I left them alone because I was curious to see what would happen.

Well, the tall flower stalks (about 3-4 feet tall, I think) started putting on hundreds of these tiny flower buds that, according to the internet, each only opened for quick 30 minutes to self-pollinate and start setting seeds. I caught a few of the open flowers here and there throughout this summer, as you can see in the picture above.  The self-pollinated flowers turned into fuzzy seed heads, like dandelion, as a bunch of seeds formed inside each seed head.

I'm guessing that the fuzzy stuff is intended to carry mature seeds away by wind.  But I also noticed that many seed heads still had seeds intact and just lost the fuzzies.

So I took each seed head and crumbled it gently between my thumb and forefinger to harvest the seeds.  It was pretty easy, and I could do it while the seed head was still attached to the stem.  I then unloaded the contents pinched between my thumb and forefinger to a paper plate.  I repeated this process, um, like a hundred times until I got tired of it and decided I probably had enough lettuce seeds to plant an acre.  In case you're wondering, my vegetables garden is not an acre.  Not even close.

I'm not really sure how I can separate the seeds from chaff, as they all just came apart together.  Does anyone know of a easy way to do this?  Otherwise, I guess it won't hurt anything to just scatter-sow these seeds along with the chaff during next planting time.

Some lettuce seeds were black and some were white.  I'm assuming they are different varieties of lettuce, as I had several different varieties (that I can no longer identify from the bolted lettuce) planted in that corner of the garden. 

There are still hundreds more lettuce flowers and seed heads in the garden.  I don't know if I have the heart to just pull them all out, but I don't really want to harvest any more seeds, either.  Oh the dilemma.  At least I learned my lesson for next year.  If I decide to save lettuce seeds again, I will just let one or two flower stalks develop and that will still give me plenty of seeds, far more than what I can reasonably use or share.  When the weather gets too hot, I will pull out the remaining lettuce to make room for something new, like bush beans.

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.

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!