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.

8/23/10 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.

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.

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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?

7/19/10 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.

7/5/10 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 First Harvest Monday

This is my very first time participating in Daphne's Harvest Monday! Although my harvest isn't quite as bountiful as those of the more experienced and successful gardeners out there, I'm still very proud of my harvest. I'm still amazed that I can actually grow anything edible!

This week, I harvested mostly green onions. The larger ones were the ones I grew from my grocery store leftovers (I bought a bunch of green onions, ate them, saved the last 2 inches of the root ends, and planted them in a pot). The smaller ones were thinnings from the green onions I'm growing from seed this year. Not really knowing what I was doing, I sowed the seeds really close to each other (they all sprouted pretty much touching each other), so I still have a bunch more to thin out. They may be small, but they still smelled and tasted very onion-ey.

Oh, and I also cut some oregano and thyme for Keith to use in the rub for his pork loin roast, which I ended up missing last night because I was in a rush to get to the airport. Here's another picture of the green onions after they were washed.


We chopped up the green onions (both big and small ones) and used them to make some tasty breakfast on Sunday.



Even though I still have a lot of green onions left in the garden, I decided to save the root ends to see if I could grow them again. I cut them much shorter than I did last time, just to experiment and see if they will grow from stubs even shorter than 2 inches. The smaller onions, I cut a little longer, just to give them a bit more of a chance to regrow, if at all.


Here is a picture of one of the short root stubs, back in the pot. I'm really curious to see if they will grow again. If not, I'll go back to replanting 2-inch root ends.