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!

Germinating Cantaloupe Seeds

Do you ever test-germinate your seeds to see how good they are?

We bought a cantaloupe from a local farmer's market a few weeks ago, and I saved the seeds.  I put the slimy gooey seeds into a bowl, filled it with water, discarded all the ones that floated to the top and just kept the ones that stayed at the bottom of the bowl.  Then I dried them on some newspaper.  Even after discarding the floaty seeds, I probably still have well over a hundred seeds.  I'm definitely not going to plant all of them and I'm sure they will go "bad" in a few years, long before I get around to ever using them all up, either personally or through seed trading.  But before I considered allocating garden space to these seeds and/or trading them away, I wanted to make sure that these seeds were good.

So I placed about a dozen seeds on a sheet of wet paper towel, loosely wrapped them up and put the whole thing in a ziploc bag.  I left the ziploc part open for ventilation, and placed the bag in my grow box.  About five days later, this is what they looked like:

Every single one of the seeds germinated!  Not only that, the roots were really starting to develop, with some of them growing through the double-ply paper towel and coming out on the bottom.  Since I don't know the variety of the parent cantaloupe, I probably won't plant very many of them.  But it's good to know that these seeds are good!

Before you ask, no, I did not save these seedlings, because our indoor grow box is definitely not big enough to grow melons in over the winter.  It's always difficult throwing perfectly good seedlings away, but they served their experimental purpose, and went to go rest (permanently) in the compost pile.

Have a happy Friday everyone, and stay tuned for a Lupe update this weekend!

Cinnamon Spiced Applesauce

With my first attempt at homemade applesauce, I have now joined the ranks of "people who process and preserve their produce."  Well, maybe I should say semi-joined, or joined as a junior member, since I neither grew the apples myself nor properly canned the applesauce (I opted for the refridgerator version in recycled glass jars).

To make applesauce, I used Cortland apples that Keith and I picked ourselves last weekend from a local orchard.

I can't remember if this is a picture of a Cortland apple, or a Jonathan apple, which I used to make an apple tart/pie.  If you'd like, check out my yesterday's post about apple picking and tart baking.

Since I had never made applesauce before, I looked up a few recipes on the internet and realized that making applesauce is less science (like baking) and more art (like cooking).  So my own improvised version went something like this:

*   *   *   *   *

Cinnamon Spiced Applesauce

5 lbs of apples - peeled, quartered and cored
1 1/4 cups water (or 1/4 cup water per pound of apples)
5 Tablespoons brown sugar (or 1T per pound of apples)
*1 1/4 Tablespoons ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg (I used a few generous shakes)

*In retrospect, about 1-2 teaspoon cinnamon would probably suit most people's tastes.

Add all ingredients into a large pot.  Bring to boil over high heat, then reduce heat to medium, cover and cook for about 20-25 minutes, or until apples are very soft.  Remove the pot from heat and mash apples with a potato masher.

*   *   *   *   *

Aside from the slightly tedious chore of peeling and coring apples, which I did by hand with a small knife, making applesauce was surprisingly simple and intuitive.  I only used 1 tablespoon of brown sugar per pound of apples because I wanted very lightly sweetened applesauce.  Sugar can be left out altogether or increased up to four times this amount (probably grocery store level of sweetness at that point) depending on your taste.

The resulting applesauce had a slightly orange/brown tint to it, even more so in this picture due to poor light quality in the kitchen at the time.  I think it's from the brown sugar and/or the amount of cinnamon, because peeled apples are supposed to give you light golden/yellow applesauce.  Next time, I will probably reduce the amount of cinnamon by half and use only about 1-2 teaspoons.  The reason we used so much this time was because Keith was in charge of adding the spices and he LOVES cinnamon.  He thought this batch of applesauce tasted great, but I would prefer somewhat less cinnamon.  I might also try sprinkling in a little bit of ground cloves and allspice to add another depth to the spice flavor.

This applesauce was served warm right after I made it and also cold the next day for after-dinner dessert.  Both times, it was delicious.

Apple Picking and Tart Baking

If I had my druthers, I would grow apples this beautiful and perfect right in my backyard.

However, life does not always let me have what I want, exactly the way I want it.  So, since Keith and I don't have a single fruit tree in our garden, we went apple picking last weekend at a local orchard.  Other people's apples are better than no apples, right?

This orchard is located a little over 20 miles from where we live, and I have to say, I had no idea we lived so close to "country."  It's been almost two years since I've been in Indiana, and granted, I've worked out of state for more than half that time, but it still amazes me every time I see what seems like miles and miles of fields planted with corn or soy so close to "where people live."  It really is a big change from living in ultra-urban compact cities like San Francisco or the sprawling concrete jungle of suburban Los Angeles.

The orchard was beautiful.  Once I got over my initial shock and slight panic at how many apples were lying discarded due to pest damage, rotting or just accidental falling off the tree branch while you're trying to pick another one, I had a lot of fun picking apples.  I heard several parents tell their kids "don't pick up any apples off the ground!"

We ended up picking about 16 lbs of apples of three different varieties: Jonathan, Cortland and Gala.

With 2 lbs of Jonathan apples, I baked a simple apple tart with buttery pie dough made from scratch.  Well, the recipe was for apple tart, but I didn't have a tart pan, so I baked it in a regular pie pan.  It wasn't perfect, but it still made a delicious apple tart/pie. Next time, I may have to break down and get a tart pan so I can bake a proper apple tart.

This post is linked to Tuesday Garden Party.

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? 

Growing Rosemary from Seed

When we were at Menards this spring to purchase seeds for our first vegetable garden, we used both logic (let's get bush varieties of some vegetables because we don't have any trellises yet) and whim (oh, look at the pretty picture on this seed envelope!) to select our seeds.  When it came to rosemary, I think it was Keith who said something to the effect of "rosemary would be good to have around, for cooking chicken and stuff."  So we bought a packet of rosemary seeds.

The seed packet instruction said to sow the seeds indoors 10-12 weeks before the average last frost date.  Well, it was already May, well past the last frost, but that shouldn't make a difference if I'm sowing seeds indoors, right?  So I sowed my seeds in little cups, and waited for them to germinate.  I waited, waited and then waited some more.

I don't actually remember how long it took before the first sign of life popped up from those seeds, but it took a really long time, at least 3-4 weeks.  And germination was sporadic.  As in, although some seeds started germinating at 3-4 weeks, the other seeds didn't germinate for at least 2 months.  The rest of them just didn't make it.  Later, I learned that even good rosemary seed stocks only have about 30 percent germination rates at best.  My seeds were probably very average, then, instead of very subpar that I accused them of being at the time.

June 25, 2010 (at 6 weeks)

After the seedlings got their second set of leaves, I transplanted them to bigger containers, anticipating that they would need the extra space.  Ha, if only I knew then what I know now.  At the rate that these seedlings have been growing, they probably could have stayed in their baby containers for the first year.

I scoured the internet to see what we were doing wrong with them and why they weren't growing faster.  Then I learned that rosemary is notoriously difficult to germinate and to grow from seed, and most websites talking about growing rosemary recommended growing them from cuttings or nursery plants.  All this just made me and Keith even more determined (read: stubborn) to keep growing our rosemary seedlings. 

August 8, 2010 (at 12 weeks)

As small as these seedlings were, they just gave off the most incredibly strong (and pleasant) rosemary aroma every time I touched their teeny leaves.  It's just pure torture waiting for them to grow big enough to harvest!

August 21, 2010 (at 14 weeks)

It's been almost four months now, and some of the seedlings have finally started putting on some noticeable growth.  I think the largest seedlings have almost doubled their height in the last month.  I say doubled, but it's still not that much when you're talking about seedlings that are only one to two inches tall.  We did learn one thing: water them very little.  When we kept the soil looking visibly moist, the seedlings seemed to be at a standstill.  When we cut back and only watered a little bit once a week or less, to a point where the soil looked very dry on top, the seedlings finally started to grow.

September 5, 2010 (at 16 weeks)

The rosemary seedlings were moved into our indoor grow box after we built it in July, and that's where they have been this whole time.  I meant to take them outside when they grew to a "decent size" but I don't think they are there yet.  At this rate, they will probably spend all winter in the grow box.  Even when these seedlings reach a decent size, I won't plant them in the ground because I don't think they can survive the winters in Indiana.  But hopefully we can transplant them into a good sized container someday, so we can have rosemary year-round.  

You know, for chicken and stuff.

*** Rosemary Update on April 13, 2011***