1/3 Harvest - Daikon Radish

Happy New Year to everyone! 

I really want to shout out "Let the new gardening year begin!" but ironically enough, this first post of the new year presents my very last harvest of 2010.

After waiting for what seemed like forever for these daikon radishes to size up, I, uh, forgot to harvest them before a ton of snow started falling in December.  Yeah, blame it on the snow, right?  The side garden where these radishes were planted was covered with over a foot of snow and looked like this (see below) for the most part of December.

I was a bit worried that the daikons wouldn't survive a whole month of snow and bitter cold temperatures.  But the weather finally warmed up a bit while we were out of town during the last week of December, and I had one day window of opportunity to pull the daikon radishes out of the ground on December 31.

The green tops looked pretty wilted and some of the stems were rather squishy, so I didn't know if the radishes themselves would be any good.  But I harvested them anyway and was pleasantly surprised to see that some of them actually looked edible.

Somehow I was under the (false?) impression that daikon radishes would get really big, like the size of my arm, but these were only on par with small/medium carrots.  Many of these daikon radishes had really long taproots, though, so I wonder if they would grow bigger in better soil that's not as clayey like the soil in this side garden.

Anyway, these radishes had a slight spicy kick to them but they still tasted fresh and crunchy.  Even the green tops were still edible after I trimmed off all the wilty and squishy ones.  Keith and I are not big fans of eating them raw, so I chopped them up (both green tops and the radish roots) and tossed them in a stir fry with some chicken and broccoli.  They were good!

Visit Daphne's Harvest Monday to see if what other winter gardeners are still harvesting.

Fall Radishes - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

These pictures are from a few weeks ago while I was in California.  It was my first chance to harvest the Cherry Belle radishes since first planting them about 35 days ago.  I knew that was about 10 days past their normal days to maturity, but I was hoping that cooler temperatures and shorter daylights of late fall would work in my favor and not negatively affect the radishes too much.

Well, I can always hope, right?

While a bit on the small side, here are The Good.

Then we have The Bad.

And we have The Ugly.

I have read that uneven watering and being left in the ground for too long can cause radish cracking.  I've also read that under- or non-development of roots may be caused by overcrowding, temperatures being too hot or soil deficiencies.  But I'm still puzzled because all these radishes were grown in the same part of the garden sufficiently/evenly spaced away from each other.  Whatever water/light/soil nutrition these radishes might have been lacking, they all got exactly the same treatment, yet some fared much better than the others. 

Oh well, I guess it's just another proof that vegetable gardening is anything but predictable.

I am happy to report that whatever problems the radish roots were having didn't affect the green tops at all.  They all grew beautifully and were rather delicious tossed into some soup.  It was my first time eating full grown radish greens, but I'm sure it won't be the last time.

Waiting for Daikon Radish

According to the seed packet, this Daikon Radish is supposed to be a fast grower and be ready to harvest in 45 days.  Well, my radishes obviously didn't get that memo.  It's been over 75 days since I planted the seeds and I'm just now starting to see signs of some root growth.  They don't look very big to me, though, compared to how I had envisioned them.  Maybe they don't like the heavy clay soil in this small in-ground garden, even though I tried to amend it as much as possible by adding some "good" dirt.

Daikon radishes are going be one of my last harvests from the Indiana garden this year, so I'm trying to be patient.

Ack, I'm so not good at being patient for garden harvests!

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!

Fall Vegetable Gardening in Southern California

With Halloween just around the corner, there's no denying that the holidays are not too far away.  I've been busy this week trying to finalize several different travel plans involving multiple trips "all over the country" (five states in three different time zones count, right?) while attempting to coordinate with many different family members' holiday plans as much as possible.  But that's almost all done now, so back to blogging!
 
Since there isn't much going on in the Indiana garden right now, I'll provide an update on my California garden.  Yes, I call it my garden now, instead of my mom's garden.

Last time I was in CA, I weeded the whole side garden and added some more soil/compost.  I also put down some 12 inch paver stones so that I could walk across them and reach the back part of the garden, because it was almost impossible to reach the part of the garden against the wall without breaking my back while kneeling/squatting on the concrete side path.

This is what the finished garden looked like.  After my aggressive weeding, the only thing left in the garden was the cut-and-come-again lettuce mix.

Side profile of the new and improved garden

This side garden is approximately 4 feet wide by 24 feet long.  After I finished preparing the garden, I planted it with all kinds of seeds for cool-weather crops: radishes, sugar snap peas, cilantro, parsley, carrots, parsnip, kale, bok choy, tatsoi, mustard, swiss chard, spinach, lettuce, etc.  According to my CA peeps, the garden has fully germinated and is now full of lots of healthy two-week-old seedlings. 

Cherry Belle radish seedlings

Daikon radish seedling

The seedling pictures - taken with an iPhone camera - are courtesy of my sister, whom I've been bugging to email me some picture updates of my garden babies. 

 Sugar snap pea seedlings

I'll be visiting CA again in a few weeks and will provide more updates then.  It's really exciting to have a "new" fall garden to look forward to, while my Indiana garden (a bust this fall anyway due to all kinds of evil garden pests) is hunkering down for the winter.  We're expecting our first frost tonight in Indiana.  In contrast, I think the average daytime highs in my California garden will remain around 60 - 70 F degrees for most of the winter, with the nighttime lows around 40 - 50 F degrees.  As a new vegetable gardener, I totally have a newfound appreciation for the mild climate in Southern California!

Radish Seedlings from Gifted Seeds

I came home last weekend to a much-anticipated package in the mail: the winner's prize from meemsnyc's giveaway on her blog.  It was my very first time entering and winning a blog giveaway, so I felt rather lucky to be selected as the random winner.  Only if I had that kind of luck as a first time vegetable gardener!

My package was sent safe and secure in a bubble envelope and contained these items:

 

 Many different kinds of seeds and a beautiful garden notebook

I was really excited about the assortment of seeds, especially the two different kinds of radishes - Cherry Belle and French Breakfast - that I still had time to plant in my fall garden.  I tucked the radish seeds into empty spaces around my other hardy green fall seedlings.  If all goes well, the radishes will grow and be ready for harvest before the hardy greens are ready, and harvesting the grown radishes will give some breathing room back to the hardy greens as they grow bigger.  How's that for my attempt at intensive gardening!

French Breakfast radish seedlings around Red Russian Kale

After one week, the radishes have already germinated and are already a quarter of the way (I hope) to their harvestable maturity.

Many thanks to meemsnyc for her wonderful generocity!

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.

Fall Garden Woes

Someone has been eating my fall garden crops, and it's not me!

Daikon Radish Seedling

Pak Choi  or Tatsoi seeding

Pak Choi or Tatsoi Seedling

The frustrating thing is, I haven't seen any bugs around these seedlings, so I don't even know what's doing the damage.  With the cucumber beetles this summer, at least I could see them all the time on my plants so I could kill or curse them (often both at the same time).  But these fall seedlings are getting eaten up by some mystery pest and I don't know what to do, or whom to curse and blame (not productive for the garden, I know, but it can be therapeutic for myself)

Is there anyone else battling mystery seedling damage in their fall garden?