Rained out

Keith and I had plans to finish setting up our tomato trellis today.  But it's been raining all day, which is good for the garden, I suppose, but not so good for staying on top of garden chores.  If I don't get to the trellis this afternoon, then the tomatoes will have to go another whole week without any support until I can get to it again next weekend!

6/13 Harvest - Greens and Peas

It's been almost a week since our return back home, and I'm still not as organized as I would like to be in the garden, at home and with married life in general.  This last name changing business is even more tedious than I had thought!  And going back to work this week means going back to my weekly commute to Texas, which means even less time at home to get things done.  But I couldn't miss yet another Harvest Monday, so here are some pictures of our harvest from last week. 

This was Sunday's harvest, consisting of a bowlful of china choy (seeds shared by Ottawa Gardener), some green onions, a handful of sugar snap and snow peas (some seeds shared by Prairie Cat), and some red romaine lettuce.

Here's a closeup of one of the red romaine lettuce leaves.  It's not quite as productive as some of the other lettuces in the garden, and it doesn't seem to tolerate heat very well, but I do like it for the color variety it adds to the sea of greens in the garden at the moment.

This was my first sizable pea harvest (both sugar snap peas and snow peas) this season, harvested last Tuesday evening.  I had such a hard time growing peas last year, both in the spring and fall, so I'm really glad to have better luck with peas this spring.  Finally, I can harvest fresh peas right off the vines and enjoy them raw or stir-fried just minutes later in the kitchen.  I was amazed that most of these pea vines survived the brutal heat wave over the last few weeks.  I'm not sure how much longer they will survive, though, as the lower half of most of the vines are starting to look brown and dry.  But I will certainly keep enjoying these homegrown peas for as long as they last.

 

I also harvested some chard - Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard and Ruby Red Chard.  The red ones are growing much slower than the white ones, and both will probably grow bigger with time, but I was impatient and wanted to try some last week.  I'm glad I harvested some of these young chard, because they made for a very tasty wilted chard salad!

I have a lot of onions growing in the garden and I harvest some as green onions whenever I want to use them for cooking.  It's little conveniences like this that keeps me gardening!  This year, I planted red, white and yellow onions, and I think the red ones look so pretty harvested as green onions.  I know that if I just snip these off above ground and leave the roots in the soil, they will probably sprout more green onions, but I really like seeing the red part and there are plenty more still growing in the garden, so I harvest most of these red ones whole.  Ahh, little luxuries.

I also snipped some flat leaf parsley to toss in salads and pasta.  These were grown from seeds saved from last year's parsley.  The cilantro that I planted in spring have all bolted during our long absence, but parsley seems to be holding up okay.  Like green onions, I really like being able to snip a bit of parsley here and there as needed, instead of having to buy a big bundle from the grocery store and feeling rushed to use them all before they wilt in the fridge.

One of several new vegetables for me this year is mizuna.  According to the seed packet, they are supposed to grow up to 12 inches tall, but I harvested my first batch at maybe half that size just to try out the flavor.  But things don't always go as planned, and these are still sitting in the fridge because we've just had too much greens to eat this week, and I figured these will probably last longer than lettuce in the fridge. 

Finally, here is another harvest picture from sometime last week.  I harvested a colander full of lettuce, another full of swiss chard, sugar snap peas, snow peas, turnip greens, and a bit more mizuna.  This might just be the largest single day harvest we've had yet from our garden!

I probably missed a few harvest pictures, but all in all, we harvested the following from the garden last week:

• Lettuce Mix 1.38 lbs
• Swiss Chard 0.32 lbs
• Asian Greens 2.39 lbs
• Turnips 0.22 lbs
• Radish 1.0 oz
• Green Onions 0.67 lbs
• Peas (sugar snap and snow) 1.93 lbs
• Parsley 1.0 oz
• Weekly Total 7.03 lbs

While this seems like a lot of harvest for one week, I have to remember that this is what we got after three weeks of not harvesting anything during our absence.  But for now, looking at these numbers and just knowing how much fresh homegrown vegetables we were able to enjoy this week makes me downright giddy!

We're back!!

Mid-May was a great time to get married, but May/June is a difficult time to be away from vegetable gardening and garden blogging.  Everything is growing and everyone is blogging, and now I'm about a month behind with it all.

Keith and I got married last month in a small, beautiful outdoor ceremony/reception.  Some of our family/friends who have been following our blog even got a chance to personally see our garden for the first time during the weekend.  I meant to do a post on mid-May garden update, but getting married and hosting family/friends for a weekend was much more time/energy consuming than I had thought, so the blog got neglected.  Many thanks to all you readers who emailed to make sure that we were doing okay!

Then we went on a two-week honeymoon and ate our way through Spain.  We ate all kinds of everything, except fresh vegetables.  This wasn't intentional, but I guess that's how the Spaniards roll.  The news about E. coli outbreak in Germany from vegetables that may or may not have gotten contaminated in Spain started while we were in Spain, but we didn't worry about it because we hardly saw any fresh vegetables during our trip.

I worried that our vegetable garden would just die during our absence, especially with all the hot and dry 90+ degree days that Indianapolis apparently had during the last two weeks, but miraculously, the garden sort of survived.  By sort of, I mean that there were more plants still alive than dead or bolted when we came back.

I'm still slightly jet-legged, and the oppressive heat outside just about sapped all my energy while I watered the garden today, so I'm going to have to cut short here for now.  Pictures and more detailed garden updates will follow soon, but here is the most interesting garden scene to greet us back home:

We have a volunteer cucurbit of unknown origin growing right out of our compost bin!  Somehow, a seed sprouted through one of the 1-inch diameter hole in the 55-gallon plastic barrel that we use for composting, and during the two weeks that we were gone, it grew bigger than any of the squashes or cucumbers "properly" growing in one of the raised beds.

Now how are we supposed to roll this compost bin for aeration?!

5/9 Harvest - Two Parsnips

Two parsnips, that's all I harvested this week.  This is a brand new vegetable for me.  I've never bought one from the store, and I'm not sure that I've ever knowingly tasted one before.  It's one of those "new" vegetables that I learned about through garden bloggers, so I bought some seeds last year and planted it in my mom's California garden last fall.  They took forever to germinate (at least 4-5 weeks), I'm sure I disturbed the original sowing site several times in the meantime by planting other things on top of them because I thought they all died, and we may have pulled several of its seedlings by accident because we didn't know what its seedlings looked like and thought maybe they were weeds.  Long story short, we ended up with only two parsnips from a dozen or so seeds I initially sowed.

Parsnip One looked okay, kind of like a very long carrot but with much more pronounced tapering to its tip.

Parsnip Two, hmm, not so sure about this one.  When I pulled it out, my first thought was "alien tentacles!"  Upon further inspection, my second thought was still "alien tentacles!"

Head on over to Harvest Monday to see what others harvested this week!

Tiny Seedlings

I'm still mourning the loss of so many tomato seedlings, but am trying to make myself feel better thinking about all the other vegetables that are direct sown and growing in the garden.  April was a very rainy and cold month here in Indiana, so the seedlings, with the exception of sugar snap peas, haven't had much of a chance to put on decent growth.  But at least the seedlings are still alive, and just waiting for those sunny days to put on some serious growth. I just know it!

In the mean time, these are some of the tiniest babes in the garden.  So little, yet with so much potential!

Dill

Red Russian Kale

Spinach

Scallop (Patty Pan) Zucchini

Fail

 

More like Epic Fail.  Most of my tomato seedlings that seemed so happy and healthy after germination have slowly withered away to something pathetic and sickly.  Some have yellowing leaves.  Others have leaves that just shriveled up and died.  There are also some with leaves that have some darker spots, like they are diseased.  But none of them really grew after about 3-4 weeks.  I'm not really sure what killed them.  Maybe they didn't like the Jiffy peat pots that they got transplanted into after about 3 weeks.  Or maybe we watered too much.  Or too little.  Or maybe our soil mix was bad.  Or maybe our grow light wasn't good enough.  Or maybe they caught some horrible fungal or bacterial disease.

There are just too many variables here and I honestly don't know what caused most of my seedlings to die, or at least get very close to dying.  I did notice that some of the pots had a few roots showing through the bottom hole, but when I peeled off the peat pot, it didn't look like the seedlings were rootbound at all.

As a last, desperate measure, I picked out most of the better looking ones (still not all that much better than the one pictured above) and transplanted them into the garden last weekend.  I don't have high hopes for their survival because they are all still too small and the outdoor weather is still too rainy and cold.   Still, I'm hoping that natural sunlight and raised beds can work some miracles here.

If not, then I'll just have to go buy (gasp!) some transplants from the store later this month.

Ugh, if there is such a thing as mass seedling failure induced depression, I think I have it.  It's really sad to see all these dying seedlings.  It makes me especially sad to think about how so many of these seedlings were from seeds shared by other generous garden bloggers - I had such high hopes for these seeds to grow into healthy vegetable plants!

5/2 Harvest - Green Garlic

I harvested some green garlic and overwintered parsley this weekend.

Green garlic, as I've only just recently learned, is just immature (young) garlic that looks like an overgrown scallion or green onion.  When I first read about it, I was really curious to try it myself, but I hesitated to harvest any because we only planted 22 garlic cloves last fall and I didn't really want to sacrifice any of them before the garlic bulbs matured.

But this weekend, I noticed that some of the garlic greens (leaves) had already bent and broken on their own, either because they were getting too big or because it's just been too windy/rainy in Indiana the last several weeks.  I suspect both, actually.  Anyway, so I thought, well, if some of these leaves are already damaged, then I won't hurt any by harvesting some, right?  So I snipped a few leaves just below the damage.  In case you're wondering, green garlic really does smell just like fresh garlic! 

I chopped up my first green garlic harvest into small pieces and used them as one of the toppings for our homemade pizza this weekend.  The green garlic flavor was very subtle, much less than garlic, but we enjoyed it all the same.  I wondered if the white part (immature bulb) of green garlic would taste similar, but I won't know until I actually pull a whole plant out.  Hmm, I probably should try it next week, just to see if it's worth planting a lot more garlic next year to harvest some as green garlic and some as fully mature garlic bulbs.

Happy Harvest Monday!