6/20 Harvest - Not so Grand Debut of Turnip Greens

We spent a large part of this weekend building our tomato trellis structure with 10-foot electrical conduits, and spent half that time waiting for the rain and lightning to pass so we could actually work outside.  It took a lot of time, effort and muscles (more Keith's than mine), but I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.  I'll post some pictures of it later this week, but for now, it's Harvest Monday time!

 

Our cayenne pepper plant that we overwintered indoors last winter is still growing happily indoors.  It's basically a self-sufficient houseplant at this point and it continues to produce a few peppers every month or so.  Since I actually remembered to harvest them this weekend, I even took a few green ones.

Swiss chard, Red Russian kale, and one red onion harvested as green onion

Mammoth Melting snow peas.  These and sugar snap peas have been my favorite spring vegetables so far.  They are super delicious just lightly stir-fried.  For Sunday lunch, I put them in the same cast iron griddle with some mahi mahi filets, and they cooked up beautifully on the hot griddle without even stirring.  Unfortunately, the pea vines are looking even worse now than they did last week.  I'm afraid they won't last much longer in the heat.

This is our first year growing and tasting turnip, and quite possibly our last year.  Since the roots are still very small, there wasn't much to eat of them, but I steamed the green tops after finding out that they are edible.  Well, "edible" may be a subjective term, because Keith made the most pathetic "I'm never eating this again" face.  I didn't think it tasted good, but it also wasn't all that bad. Okay, maybe medium-bad.  But it's probably not something that I would choose to buy to cook for myself.  So it goes into the category of "I'm only eating this because I grew it."

Sadly, our lettuce is starting to get bitter.  I harvested some Prizehead, Red Romaine, and Quattro Stagioni (seeds shared by Robin).  Although he rejected the turnip greens, Keith did eat two large salads made with this semi-bitter lettuce, so all was not lost with the harvesting of greens this weekend.

• Lettuce Mix 13.0 oz
• Swiss Chard 6.5 oz
• Red Russian Kale 1.5 oz
• Turnips 9.0 oz
• Green Onions 1.6 oz
• Peas (sugar snap and snow) 5.1 oz
• Hot Peppers 0.65 oz
• Weekly Total 37.35 oz, or 2.34 lbs
• 2011 Total 9.37 lbs

4/4 Harvest - Overwintered Peppers

I'm officially declaring my experiment with overwintering peppers indoors a big success.  We harvested an occasional pepper here and there throughout this winter as needed, but today we harvested most of the cayenne peppers from the indoor pepper plant. My first "big" harvest of 2011, and I totally forgot to weigh it.  Sigh.  After a long winter, I guess I'm just out of practice with harvesting and reporting.

Most of the harvested peppers were already dry (because we left them on the plant unharvested for so long), but there were a few "young" peppers in there as well, as you can see in the picture above.

Above is a full body shot of the cayenne pepper plant in all its glory before we harvested the peppers.  Well, actually you can't see the peppers all that well in this picture, but they were really there.

Here's a close-up with some peppers and new blossoms.  I posted last December that this plant was starting to put on new blossoms.  After that, the blossoms and new peppers just kept coming all winter long with hardly a break, which we thought was pretty cool.  And, the pepper plant stayed green and healthy the whole time.  The best part about it all was that this plant required pretty much zero maintenance from us, aside from watering once every week or two.  Ahh, if only the rest of vegetable gardening was that simple.

Keith asked me if I was going to put the plant outside again after the weather warms up.  And the answer is... I haven't decided.  My first thought was, why fix something if it's not broken?  But who knows, maybe it will do even better outdoors in the summer heat.

Aside from the peppers, there's been many new garden activities and I'm past due on some garden updates.  Without making any promises, I'll try to post more often this week to catch up on all the garden happenings.

Happy Harvest Monday!

12/13 Harvest - December Peppers

Hello again everyone!  Somehow I let a whole month get away me from since my last blog post.  It was partially because my gardening has slowed down considerably due to wintry weather and partially because I've been enjoying some downtime with my family in California and with Keith in Indiana since my last work project in Texas ended.

But now I'm happy to be back.  For today's Harvest Monday, I don't have too much in the way of harvest, but I do have a wee bit of excitement to share.

Do you see what I see?  New pepper blossoms, in mid-December!  My cayenne pepper plant that I brought indoors about two and a half months ago has been not only surviving, but actually thriving, flowering and starting to make little baby peppers again.  I'm really surprised that the plant is producing new flowers even though we left most of the ripe red peppers on the plant for "looks."  I remember reading somewhere that picking ripe peppers will keep the plant from slowing or ceasing new flower/fruit production, but apparently the reverse is not necessarily true?

This is the top-ish view of the pepper plant.  It's a bit hard to see in this picture, but there are dozens of new blossoms on this plant.  Outside the window, you can see some dusting of snow from early last week (all these pictures were taken last week).  We've gotten a lot more snow this week to a point where I can barely see the raised boxes (10 inches high) outside under the snow. 

Compared to less than two months ago, this pepper plant has grown a lot more foliage to support new blossoms.  If you think that we crank up the heat in the house to greenhouse conditions - we don't.  We keep the thermostat set at between 66 F (night) and 68 F (day).  When I first brought this pepper plant in to winter indoors, I had hoped that it would hunker down and survive the indoor conditions without dying so that it could start to grow again next spring.  But this plant is still actively growing and definitely exceeding my best expectations.

Okay, one last picture before I sign off.  Oh, and in spirit of Harvest Monday, I did harvest four cayenne peppers from our growbox pepper plant (unfortnately no pictures) yesterday to use in our slow-cooker beef stew.  Whoa, we had some spicy stew!

Happy winter gardening!

Ripening Indoor Peppers

The indoor cayenne pepper plant has been busy ripening its peppers.  These peppers had been green for so long, I was really starting to doubt  that they would ever turn red.  But a couple of weeks after I first brought this plant indoors, the peppers started turning red one by one, and now they are beautiful.

Many of these peppers are ripe enough to be picked, but Keith wants to leave them on the plant because they look so pretty.  I have to admit, this colorful pepper plant is definitely brightening up this corner of the living room.  I'm really hoping that this plant can overwinter indoors without much trouble, so that it could grow even more foliage and peppers next year.

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.

Slow Ripening Peppers

We have our very first ripe cayenne pepper!  While the rest of the peppers are still stubbornly hanging on to their green colors, this one pepper somehow popped its red color almost overnight, kind of like... magic.

Oh, I also spotted a baby version of a tobacco hornworm on this plant.  Luckily, I caught it before it caused too much damage on the plant. I hope that was the one and only pest this pepper plant brought in from the outside.  Just the thought of "growing" one of those hornworms indoors gives me the shudders.

Although this is our first cayenne pepper that ripened on the plant, we have several more cayenne peppers that have turned red since we picked them green last week.

They really are pretty, and I can't help but keep staring at them thinking, "I grew them!"

This post is linked to Tuesday Garden Party.

Overwintering Peppers Indoors - Day One

I first entertained the idea of overwintering peppers about a month ago.  This past weekend, I decided to pull the trigger and go for it.  First, we took the two cayenne pepper plants in the five-gallon bucket and tipped the whole thing upside-down.  While Keith was holding the plants and the top of the soil (which was now at the bottom) in his hands, I lopped off about a third of the roots from the bottom of the soil (which was now at the top) and separated the smaller pepper plant from the larger one.  The larger plant got transplanted into a new pot to be brought inside for the winter.

Here is the pepper plant in its new pot and new indoor space for the winter.  I pulled off all the damaged leaves from the bottom, so the plant looks a bit bare at the moment.  That is a south-facing window behind the pepper plant, so I hope the plant can get enough sunlight to survive the winter indoors.  I'm definitely not expecting the plant to thrive indoors - I'm willing to settle for any level of "alive"! 

Here's a close-up of the pepper plant.  As you can see, this plant still has lots of green cayenne peppers.  If they ever turn red, this pepper plant is going to look really pretty!  Well, it already looks like a pretty houseplant in the living room, and Keith and I are very happy to have some greenery in the house.  But with some red peppers, I'm sure it will look even prettier.

I'm really curious to see how this will work out.  I'll be providing regular update during this winter for those of you who may be curious.

Linked to: Tuesday Garden Party

9/27/10 Harvest - First Cantaloupe

Lupe the Cantaloupe has finally arrived in time for this week's Harvest Monday!  In case you haven't read my previous cantaloupe posts, Lupe is the first melon from the first melon plant that I grew from a seed from a random supermarket cantaloupe.  It's been exactly three months since I sowed this seed outside, and Lupe was finally ready to be harvested this weekend.  She weighed in at just over 2 lbs, so she was fairly small for a cantaloupe, but Keith and I were nonetheless really excited about our first successful melon harvest.

Even though this melon smelled like a perfectly ripe melon on the outside (what a difference a week makes), I was still a bit anxious as I cut it in half.  What if it doesn't look right?  As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about because this was one ripe melon!  It may have been even a day or two overripe, but it was still very sweet, juicy and overall delicious.

Since the weather has been cooling down and the night time lows are more consistently falling down to the 40s, I'm not holding out much hope that we'll be able to harvest many more Jelly Bean tomatoes.  It's a little sad to see all those flower clusters and half-sized tomatoes that won't have time to grow to their full potential this year, but I keep reminding myself that these plants were started very late in the season (seeds were sown in early July) for experimental purposes, and any harvestable tomato is just a blessing.

I harvested all the ripe ones plus all the others that showed any hint of changing color.  Hopefully these green ones will ripen indoors.  There are still many more smaller green ones on the plants.  I'll let them go another week and see if I can get any more ripe or semi-ripe ones next week.  

I've noticed that these Jelly Bean tomatoes come in all different sizes (not sure if they are designed that way, or if the smaller fruits were just too stressed), with the smallest ones just a smidgen bigger than the size of real jelly beans.  As I mentioned last week, these tomatoes seem to be a bit on the thick-skinned side, but they are still very sweet and delicious.

I also harvested a few more cayenne peppers from our outdoor pepper plants whose days are probably numbered at this point.

These cayenne peppers just don't show any signs of turning red, but I'm going to just let them be and see if they will ripen and turn red indoors like tomatoes.  Otherwise, we can use them green, since these peppers pack plenty of heat as is.

Keith and I spent all weekend doing hard labor expanding our vegetable garden for next year.  This is a pretty big project for us and will require several more sweaty weekends, but I'm really looking forward to having more and better garden space next year to grow more of our own food.  Stay tuned for our drawings and designs for the new garden!  I'll post them later this week or next, as soon as I figure out how to convert my design documents to a picture format.

9/13/10 Crimson Giant Radish and Kumato Tomato

While the fall garden is taking time to grow and battling pest damage (most likely slug damage, gathering from many helpful readers/commenters who contributed over the weekend), the weekly harvest continues to stay rather small.  Even so, we still had some excitement this weekend in the kitchen garden.

Our first garden radishes!  I've heard that radishes are supposed to be one of the fastest growing garden vegetables.  That may be true if you're growing them under optimum conditions, but that was certainly not the case for these radishes.

I sowed the seeds for these Crimson Giant radishes in early July.  They germinated just fine after 5-7 days, but then they stopped growing.  Maybe they didn't like the hot summer in the mid-90s during most of July and August.  According to the seed packet, these are supposed to grow to 1.5 inches across, but my radishes were only 0.75 inch across.  I would have left them in the soil longer, but the leaves were getting infested with aphids (very yucky), so I pulled these two.  The third one I pulled had about 2 inches of long/narrow red root that never bulbed up.  I don't know why that one didn't grow.  The two harvested radishes tasted fairly mild but still had plenty of "radishy" flavor.

I also harvested some cilantro from the indoor grow box and two more hot cayenne peppers so that I could make some fresh salsa.  The cayenne peppers are still not showing any signs of turning red, but the green ones still pack plenty of heat for our needs.  Since we didn't have any garden tomatoes for salsa-making, I had to rely on some store-bought tomatoes.  Now, before you shake your head in disgust, check out these Kumato brown tomatoes I got from Trader Joe's.

I did some internet research, and apparently the company that developed these Kumato tomatoes has stated that it will never make the seeds available to the general public.  The tomatoes are only grown in a few European countries and Canada by certain growers selected by invitation only.  There's also some controversy as to where these tomatoes originated and whether they are open-pollinated or a hybrid variety. 

After reading all this, I did something that any curious backyard gardener would do:  I saved the seeds.  Well, the seeds are in the processing of being saved and going through the fermentation process at the moment.  It's my first time saving tomato seeds, so we'll see how it works out. 

Anyway, these Kumato tomatoes were pretty brown/black/greenish in color and somewhat sweeter than "regular" red tomatoes.  They made beautiful tasty salsa with our hot cayenne peppers.

Please visit Daphne's Harvest Monday for more fall harvests.

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.

Overwintering Peppers

It is still sweltering hot outside and I haven't harvested a single pepper yet this year, but I'm already thinking about possibly overwintering peppers.  Yeah, I admit it, patience is definitely not one of my strong suits.  Planning ahead, however, is! 

Eight weeks ago, I started some Long Thin Cayenne pepper seeds to see how well they would grow in our new indoor grow box.  I knew it was late in the season to start peppers, but it was an experiment and I wasn't counting on being able to actually harvest any peppers this year (I sure was hoping, though!).  But the pepper seedlings did really well in the grow box, so we transplanted three of them outside.  And now we have peppers!  I don't know how long it will take for these to ripen red, but I'm excited for even green peppers.

Cayenne peppers, still green.

There are actually two cayenne pepper plants in this five-gallon bucket.  I was worried that they would be crowded, but they seem to be doing okay so far.

This is the cayenne pepper plant growing in the square foot gardening box.  This plant is smaller than the ones growing in the five-gallon bucket, but some peppers have already formed on this plant, hopefully with more to come.

I've been wondering if I could bring the pepper plants inside to overwinter them.  Wondering always leads to questions, many questions.  How much sunlight do pepper plants require to overwinter?  Could they survive indoors near a south-facing window?  Or would east-facing windows be better during the winter?  If I could successfully overwinter pepper plants, would they produce peppers all winter long, or hunker down and just go into some sort of survivor dormant mode?

If I could figure out a place to keep them over winter, I sure would like to try to keep them alive, as peppers are technically perennials in warmer zones.  I read somewhere that second year pepper plants are often more productive than first year plants.  Isn't that just fascinating?

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.