Barefoot Kitchen Witch - In the Garden

Houston, We Have a Broccoli!

Actually, we’ll have ten of them if all goes well.

They’re doing really well.  Big and leafy and healthy.

It’s funny, our kids eat lots of vegetables that other kids don’t necessarily like…and I think it’s because we grow so many of them.  The kids get to see them start out as little seedlings, and then grow into plants and produce, in one form or another, something edible.  It’s kind of magical.  And special, because we grew them in our own gardens.

So I’m figuring I’ll feel that way about these broccoli plants.  It’s not my favorite vegetable…but since we grew them in our very own garden, I think I might like them just a little bit.

More Planting – Beans and Beets

Yes, we like to schedule our planting based on whether or not the names of the vegetables rhyme.

Or almost rhyme.

Not really. 

That’s just the way it worked out this time.

Building and Planting

We’ve had great success with these two raised beds – not only in the regular growing season, but through this past winter as well.

And last summer after we (well, Bill and Alex) cut down the cherry tree that used to be behind those beds, we decided to use that space for two more 4x4 raised beds.

Bill’s been getting the new spots ready, digging down into the dirt, getting rid of sod, and loosening the earth.

And yesterday – a warm, sunny, gorgeous example of a Spring day – Bill (with help) built the frames for the two raised beds, set them in place, filled them with compost, peat, garden lyme, manure and organic fertilizer, and transplanted the broccoli.

Now, while this was going on, I was inside baking a few things, so some of my pictures were taken through the kitchen windows and others were done when I went outside to get a better view.

Here’s a look…

First, Bill put together one frame, and then he let the kids use the electric sander to smooth the sides.  They love helping.

Then it was time to set the frame into the ground.

Bill showed them all (my two and a friend from across the street) how to use the rubber mallet, and then they all got a turn.

Once the frame was firmly set in the ground and level, it was time to add the compost.

They had even more help for this, as another of the little boys across the street showed up.  They had two wheelbarrows going – the big one and the little red plastic one – with the kids working in teams to fill, deliver, dump the compost.

Teamwork!

After all that, they put the other frame together and repeated the whole process.

By mid afternoon, both new raised beds were ready to go.

The last garden project yesterday was to move the broccoli to their permanent growing location.  Third bed from the front.

First, though – lyme and fertilizer.

Next, replanting the plantlings.

We had ten plants in total.

And even though I don’t LOVE broccoli…I’m excited that we’re growing it…and I’m sure it will be quite delicious.

February Thaw in the Winter Garden

It’s an amazing 45 degrees outside right now – in the shade – so Bill and Alex dug through the melting snow so that they could peek inside one of the winter gardens and see how everything has fared during these weekly burials under ever more snow for the past month or more.

After the digging was done, I headed outside at Bill’s urging to see just how warm it was inside the garden.

Almost barefoot.

We’re going to have to get new plastic for next winter – this stuff has had it.  Lots of holes.

Below is a weird picture I took – I must have been bent over sideways like an upside-down capital L or something because I don’t know how else my whole leg could be way over there on that side of the frame.  But anyway, near my dainty foot is the corner of one of the two raised beds.

I had to sort of crawl into the garden, and when I did, look what I found!

An Alex!  He was just hanging out in there, enjoying the balmy temperatures – Bill estimates it was in the fifties inside, maybe even low sixties.

I brought Alex a snack, which he declined.  “My hands are all dirty.”  He’s remarkably tidy, though you’d never know it to look at his hair.

Anyway, in this garden you can see some GREEN stuff – tatsoi and, somewhere in there, spinach.

The oregano is doing well…

And (below) a tiny little cilantro plant over to the right.  Brave little cilantro!

Apparently Bill and Alex used bits of snow to water the plants.  It will melt in the warmth.

Over here we’ve got mint (the black planters) and rosemary.

And then Alex directed me back to the left so I could see a dead earwig (on the purplish leaf slightly right of center, below).

I had to get back inside to check on the pound cake in the oven, but Alex decided to stay a little longer.

“If I was a plant, I’d like to live in here!”

Winter Garden - Still Green Under There

These were taken on Saturday.  Bill went out to pick some things to go along with our dinner, and I came out to take pictures.

Really quick pictures.  It's cold outside.  Cold under the plastic, too, but not as cold as outside it, and not at all windy. 

Things aren't growing quickly any more, but they're there, and they're green, and that's all we've asked for this year.

Next year we're going to set the winter gardens back farther in our yard.  We won't physically move these raised beds - we'll be putting in some more.  The current beds are a bit too close to the house - great for us when we want to run out and pick something, but the house blocks some of the winter sunlight, so if we set them up farther back next year, they'll get more sun, more warmth, and we'll get more produce.

Still, we can't complain.  Fresh produce from our back yard in December?  In New England?  Thank you very much!

A Peek at the Winter Garden

Salad, anyone?

Preparing the Winter Garden

I’m a leeeeeeeeetle bit late posting this, but we’re having a bit of a warm spell so I’ll just pretend it doesn’t matter.  Did that make sense?

No matter.  Here’s what we’ve done…

Oooh, a Giveaway!

Click here to find out allllllllllllllllllllllll about it!

Garlic Harvest 2010

Yesterday we had the kids harvest all the garlic and weed the back-most garden.  Not as punishment for anything, but because it needed doing and Bill and I have been working on the house.

So here's our haul:

There were four or five other heads of garlic we'd picked a few days earlier, to make room for the squash or a tomato plant or something, so those, plus all this, comes to about fifty heads or bulbs of garlic.  YAY, GARLIC!  I laid them all out on an overturned plastic sled in the sun to dry for a while.  After that I was able to knock off any dirt still clinging to them.

We're giving a couple to my dad to plant in the fall, and a couple to a friend of ours, and we'll save some for ourselves to plant, and then the rest will be for cooking. 

I might take some of them and roast them, puree them with olive oil and then freeze the puree in ice cube trays.  I love having roasted garlic on hand.  So yummy mixed into just about anything - a couple cubes added to whatever pasta sauce I'm making, or blended with herbs and tossed with sliced, roasted potatoes, or added to the pan when I'm making gravy. 

We'd cut and cooked most of the garlic scapes - the seed pods that grow from the garlic plant - but these two were late bloomers, so I just let them go - and we've got these mini little garlic bulbs now. 

The next step in the whole garlic process was to let them cure.  Basically what's happening here is the outer layers of skin dry out.  This protects the inner layers from mold and allows you to keep them a nice, long time (if you don't use them up quickly). 

You need to have good air flow around all the garlic, otherwise you could have areas that remain damp and are more prone to mildew and rotting. 

I'd seen something online that someone had built for this purpose - two long pieces of wood spaced maybe an inch apart and held together somehow (I'm so technical here, I know) and you just hang the garlic in the space so the head rests on the wood and the stalk hangs below.  Air circulates, the garlic dries, and yee-ha, you're all set.

I didn't feel like building one like that, so I poked around in the garage to see what I could find that would serve the same purpose. 

So what you see in the images below is the mattress support from one of the kids' cribs.  It's sitting on an old ironing board.  I've used tape to make the spaces in the mattress support narrower, and then I poked the garlic through.  I spaced the garlic so that no bulbs were touching each other.  And that's it.  Pretty simple, right?

Same view in the next shot, but I used a flash, just in case the above image was too dark.

And that's the story of this year's garlic harvest! 
 

Zucchini Blossom

I went outside this morning to hang out some laundry and was happily surprised to see a blossom on our zucchini plant.  I wish there were about a dozen more so I could stuff them and cook them for dinner, but it's still a bit early yet.

I hesitate to even say it, but the gardens seem to be doing pretty well this year.  We've already had a bumper crop of broccoli rabe, and assorted salad greens, and we picked the spinach yesterday because it's getting too hot now and the spinach was ready to bolt. 

The front square garden has, going left to right, kohlrabi, green and red lettuces, potatoes and fennel, and then red noodle beans and some other kind of green bean.  The other square garden was full of broccoli rabe not long ago and now has some tomatoes and an assortment of hot peppers.  Behind that, along this side of the fence, we've got assorted tomatoes, basil, various squashes, garlic, some cilantro (which we have everywhere - it seeded itself) and a little strawberry plant that decided to show up this year and has done very nicely.  On the other side of the fence are more squash, eggplant, basil, dill, cilantro, fenugreek, and an artichoke.  The buckets are mainly peas, with one tomato plant. 

Our cherry tree - the half dead thing to the right - will be coming down at some point, probably after the fruit is done.  It just isn't happy here; sections of branches just die at random, and in order to get rid of whatever pest is doing that, we'd have to spray chemicals, and we just don't want to.  So we'll let it bear fruit and then, Washington-like, we'll cut it down and use the wood in the smoker.  No waste.  And we'll probably extend the garden back further as well.